onal 
ity 


f 


SIX  MASTERS  IN  DISILLUSION 


SIX    MASTERS 
IN    DISILLUSION 


BY 

ALGAR    THOROLD 


NEW  YORK 
E.  P.  BUTTON  AND  COMPANY 

29    WEST    23RD    STREET 
1909 


ERRATA 

P.  84,  line  4.  For  '  absent  from  the  pages '  read  '  absent  from  these 
pages.' 

P.  87,  line  14.  For  'hence  the  success  of  the  uneducated'  read 
'  hence  her  success  with  the  uneducated.' 

P.  91,  line  8.  For  'qu'il  semble  une  parole,  issue  de  1'accouplement 
de  Lisa'  read  'qu'il  semble,  ma  parole,  issu  de  1'accouplement 
de  Lisa.' 

P.  116,  line  8.  For  'The  generalisations  by  means  of  which  we 
organise  what  we  call  "external,"'  read  'The  generalisations 
by  means  of  which  we  organise  what  we  call  "external  reality."' 


The  first  six  Essays  in  this  volume 
have  already  appeared,  much  in  their 
present  form,  in  the  Edinburgh^  In- 
dependent, and  Albany  Reviews,  The 
Author's  thanks  are  due  to  Messrs. 
Longmans,  and  to  the  Progressive 
Press,  Ltd.,  for  permission  to  reprint 
them.  The  Epilogue  appears  here 
for  the  first  time. 


TO    THE    READER 

IN  order  that  the  reader  may  be  as  little  disap- 
pointed as  possible  with  these  studies,  I  must 
explain  that  they  are  not  concerned  with  strictly 
contemporary  disillusion.  The  period  which  they 
are  intended,  in  a  very  partial  and  tentative  way,  to 
illustrate  is  behind  us,  and  its  forces  are  in  great 
measure  already  spent.  Contemporary  disillusion, 
of  which,  among  the  writers  here  noticed,  Anatole 
France  alone  could  fairly  be  considered  an  example, 
is  a  different  matter.  Our  fathers  were  rationalists, 
and  were  naive  enough  to  think  that  Theology 
stood  or  fell  by  its  claims  to  rationality.  They 
thought  that  the  cosmology  and  psychology  of 
Christianity,  the  propositions  which  it  enunciated 
about  the  nature  of  man  and  the  world  he  finds 
himself  in,  were  intended  to  be  taken  as  facts. 
As  facts  they  tested  them,  with  the  result  that  the 
account  of  the  world  and  man  contained  in  the 

ix 


x  SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

Sacred  Books  of  Christianity  and  the  authoritative 
decrees  of  the  Church,  have  ceased  to  form  part  of 
the  mental  culture  of  the  West- European  races. 
For  although  the  Catholic  Church  still  lives — and 
he  must  know  little  of  humanity  who  doubts  that  it 
will  go  on  living — ecclesiastical  cosmology,  history 
and  psychology  are  things  of  the  past  as  irrelevant 
to  contemporary  knowledge  as  the  Hindu  Pan- 
theon or  Muslim  Demonology.  The  work  of  the 
rationalist  emancipators  in  this  respect  has  been 
done,  and  done  so  thoroughly  that  it  forms  part  of 
the  unquestioned  mental  heritage  that  everybody 
takes  for  granted.  Nevertheless  we,  or  at  least 
those  of  us  who  are  disillusioned  to-day,  are  not 
rationalists.  We  have  pushed  analysis  further 
than  our  fathers  did,  nay,  in  our  turn,  we  have 
laid  sacrilegious  hands  on  their  standard  of  truth. 
It  has  fared  no  better  at  our  hands  than  that  of 
their  fathers  did  at  theirs.  This  is,  however,  not 
the  place  to  discuss  contemporary  disillusion. 

It  is  in  the  disillusionment  consequent  on  this 
change  of  attitude  towards  Christianity  in  which 
the  writers  studied  here  agree.  In  nearly  every- 
thing else  they  differ.  Fontenelle,  a  sort  of  smil- 
ing malicious  Precursor  of  the  Evangel  of  the  last 


TO   THE  READER  xi 

two  centuries,  seems  to  attain  prophetically  the 
scepticism  of  a  later  period.  He  was  a  very 
difficult  person  to  pay  with  words.  Merimee, 
equally  detached  from  the  optimism  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  presents  rather  the  elegant 
cynicism  of  the  man  of  the  world  who  will  not 
admit  that  he  is  wounded  to  the  heart.  The 
masterly  studies  of  ecclesiastical  psychology  which 
we  owe  to  Ferdinand  Fabre  indicate  one  aspect  of 
the  line  of  defence  adopted  by  the  clergy  against 
the  changed  world  in  which  they  find  themselves. 
That  attitude  was  an  important  factor  in  the 
politics  of  every  country  in  Europe  where  the 
Church  had  power  during  the  nineteenth  century, 
and  contributed  most  effectively  to  the  detachment 
of  the  educated  classes  from  Christianity.  Maeter- 
linck, on  the  other  hand,  while  emphatically  post- 
Christian,  and  therefore  deriving  from  the  specific 
disillusionment  of  the  eighteenth  century,  retains 
much  of  the  optimism  of  the  Fathers  of  the 
Encyclopaedia.  Indeed  his  optimism  is  but  faintly 
tempered  by  the  delays  and  incertitudes  of  science, 
not  at  all  by  philosophical  analysis,  while  his 
appreciation  of  the  enormous  difficulties  in  the 
way  of  any  serious  human  advance,  his  view  of 


xii         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

the  actual  situation,  seem  at  times  disconcertingly 
vague.  But  then  he  has  the  divine  gift  of  mysti- 
cism, a  very  special  mysticism  of  his  own,  if  you 
will,  inspired,  in  so  far  as  it  is  philosophical,  by 
Hartmann's  '  Unconscious,'  made  effective  through 
the  essential  poetry  of  his  own  nature. 

Anatole  France,  as  I  have  said,  represents  a  riper 
mood  of  scepticism,  the  mood  of  Renan  in  his  last 
years.  The  vision  of  the  age  of  reason  which 
inspires  the  labours  of  the  Encyclopaedists  no 
longer  inspires  him.  In  him  disillusion  may  be 
said  to  reach  its  term.  Yet,  in  many  ways,  he  is 
the  most  dix-huitieme  of  any  writer  of  the  present 
time.  The  optimism,  which,  as  far  as  rational 
tests  go,  is  in  no  better  position  than  theology, 
has  nevertheless  left  in  his  mind  a  sweet  and 
mellow  compassion  for  humanity,  an  inextinguish- 
able love  of  man,  which  gives  an  irresistible 
attractiveness  to  his  work  at  its  best,  and  then  his 
exquisite  manner,  the  naive  charm  with  which 
he  presents  his  purely  intellectual  perversity  recalls 
so  delightfully  the  mignardise  of  the  age  of  salons. 

Among  these  writers  perhaps  the  most  bitter 
and  poignant  master  in  disillusion  is  Huysmans. 
Disillusion  does  not  remain  a  purely  intellectual 


TO   THE   READER  xiii 

phase,  and  no  one  has  expressed  more  vividly  than 
he,  its  sentimental  and  sensuous  reactions.  The 
course  which  his  personal  disillusion  among  other 
motives  led  him  to  adopt,  while  itself  obviously 
outside  legitimate  criticism,  serves  nevertheless  as 
the  measure  of  the  depth  to  which  that  disillusion 
went. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 

TO  THE  READER,    ...  v 


FONTENELLE,  .            .            i 

PROSPER  MERIMEE, 26 

FERDINAND  FABRE, 56 

JORIS-KARL  HUYSMANS,  ....          80 

MAETERLINCK,        .  .            .            .            .            .96 

ANATOLE  FRANCE,  .            .                        .            .119 

EPILOGUE,      .  147 


FONTENELLE 

THE  extraordinary  clear-headedness  of  the  French,  ' 
their  readiness  to  pursue  an  idea  to  its  logical  term 
and  its  complete  literary  and  social  expression,  gives 
to  their  fortunes  at  any  given  moment,  an  air  of 
finality  which  seems  at  first  sight  to  contradict  that 
law  of  perpetual  variation,  which  we  know  to  reign 
in  the  process  of  human  affairs,  as  in  all  other  mani- 
festations of  Nature.  It  is  needless  to  say  that 
this  appearance  is  delusive ;  changes  occur  in 
France  as  elsewhere.  And,  owing  perhaps  to 
this  very  capacity  for  logic  in  the  French,  they 
occur  there  in  the  most  startling  and  dramatic 
way :  generally  in  the  way  of  a  complete  volte-face ; 
all  must  be  pulled  down,  all  must  be  built  anew. 
Napoleon  has  hardly  climbed  to  the  height  of  his 
uncertain  despotism,  when  he  proceeds  to  remodel 
the  whole  religious  and  social  life  of  the  nation,  as 
if  he  were  founding  an  empire  for  eternity,  instead 
of  for  eleven  years.  He  falls,  and  Monarchy 
and  Republic  follow  each  other  with  bewildering 
rapidity.  Nevertheless  below  the  surface,  scintil- 

A 


2  SIX   MASTERS   IN  DISILLUSION 

lating  with  coups  d'Etat  and  proclamations,  appeals 
to  the  people  and  counter-proclamations,  all  based 
on  mutually  exclusive  first  principles,  the  work  of 
slow  and  gradual  transition  goes  on.  The  char- 
acter of  an  individual  does  not  move  as  quickly  as 
his  mere  intellect :  still  more  uneven  in  their  gait 
are  mental  and  temperamental  changes  in  a  nation. 
This  law  of  variability,  the  condition  of  all  life,  was 
never  more  completely  ignored  than  in  the  France 
of  the  seventeenth  century.  All  then  was  built 
for  eternity,  and  seemed,  indeed,  in  a  fair  way  to 
possess  it.  The  great  chateaux  of  the  period, 
some  of  which,  spared  by  the  Revolution,  still 
stand  as  symbols  of  that  brilliant  past,  did  not 
defy  the  hand  of  time  more  audaciously  than  the 
theories  of  its  philosophers,  theologians  and  poli- 
ticians. They  were  more  successful  in  their  de- 
fiance, because  masonry,  if  good  enough,  enjoys  a 
permanence  denied  to  systems  of  thought.  From 
the  great  King  himself — one  of  the  few  kings  who 
have  also  been  statesmen — down  to  the  lay-sisters 
of  Port  Royal,  all,  whether  their  cause  were  the 
political  greatness  of  the  nation,  the  superiority  of 
the  Ancients  over  the  Moderns,  or  the  niceties 
of  prevenient  Grace,  fought  in  it  from  the  point  of 
view  which  may  be  supposed  to  animate  St. 
Michael  in  his  contest  with  Lucifer.  Truth  was 
absolute,  Truth  was  eternal,  error  must,  in  the  long 


FONTENELLE  3 

run,  fail  from  a  sort  of  metaphysical  necessity.  It 
was  but  a  dream,  though  a  great  and  majestic  one, 
and  France  has  not  yet  got  through  the  throes  of 
her  awakening.  Nevertheless  some  of  the  acutest 
intellects  that  have  ever  been,  took  it  for  a  reality. 
Let  us  humble  ourselves. 

There  could  be  no  greater  mistake  than  to 
imagine  that  the  affirmations  of  the  seventeenth 
century  in  thought,  in  theology,  in  statecraft,  were 
but  vain  forms  of  words,  idly  repeated  by  a  genera- 
tion which  had  no  taste  for  speculative  inquiry. 
On  the  contrary,  that  century  was  a  far  more 
truly  philosophical  period  than  the  succeeding  one 
which  usurped  the  name.  Pascal,  the  Prometheus 
of  modern  Catholicism,  stands  alone  in  the  magni- 
ficence of  his  despair,  Descartes  and  Malebranche 
are  the  two  French  philosophers  who  have  a  real 
claim  to  be  considered  metaphysicians.  The 
genius  of  the  age  was  constructive  in  every  de- 
partment of  human  affairs.  It  was  constructive, 
and  it  undertook  its  task  in  an  a  priori  spirit. 
Every  one  argued  from  absolute  premisses  to  irre- 
fragable conclusions.  It  was  not  only  the  party  in 
authority  that  did  so;  Jurieu  treated  the  recalci- 
trant Bayle  in  precisely  the  same  way  as  he  himself 
had  been  treated  by  Bossuet.  It  did  not  occur  to 
any  one  to  appeal  to  facts,  partly  because  most  of 
the  controversies  in  the  air  could  hardly  be  affected 


4  SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

by  such  an  appeal,  and  partly  because  men  had 
hardly  come  to  recognise  their  relevance  to  their 
own  well-being.  Yet,  just  then,  unsuspected  by 
philosophers  and  theologians,  after  an  interval  of 
centuries,  during  which  men  had  a  free  hand  with 
which  to  fashion  a  cosmos  in  their  own  image,  the 
Fact  was  being  born  again  into  the  world  of  human 
significance.  It  was  their  unconsciousness  of  this 
which  delivered  these  great  thinkers  bound  into 
the  hands  of  their  successors  of  the  following  cen- 
tury, men  as  a  rule  considerably  their  inferiors, 
both  in  intellect  and  imagination.  Already  when 
the  glory  of  Lewis  the  Great  was  at  its  height, 
when  Bossuet's  Universal  History  appeared  to 
culminate,  and  thereby  find  its  justification  in  the 
Church  and  State  of  France,  the  man  was  born 
who  represented  in  his  life  and  work,  more  com- 
pletely perhaps  than  any  contemporary,  the  coming 
spirit  of  negation  and  criticism  which  was  surely  to 
sap  the  foundations  of  that  splendid  edifice.  That 
man  was  Fontenelle. 

Bernard  le  Bovier,  Sieur  de  Fontenelle,  was  born 
at  Rouen  in  1657.  It  was  one  of  his  originalities 
to  live  to  be  a  centenarian,  an  originality  which  en- 
abled him  to  fill  successively  the  r61es  of  prophet 
and  traditional  authority.  To  the  seventeenth 
century  he  prophesied  of  what  was  to  come,  and 
to  the  eighteenth  he  stood  as  a  reminder  of  its 


FONTENELLE  5 

origins.  No  one  contributed  more  than  he  did  to 
the  bringing  about  of  that  vast  change  in  opinion 
which  occurred  during  his  lifetime. 

The  right  view  of  Fontenelle  is  not  quite  easy. 
No  one  was  ever  less  like  an  apostle  of  new  and 
unwelcome  truths.  He  was  the  first  specimen  of 
a  new  race  of  writers.  He  wrote  poetry  without 
being  a  poet,  philosophy  without  being  a  philo- 
sopher, science  without  being  an  experimentalist. 
He  does  not  appear  to  have  had  a  passion  for 
truth,  but,  on  the  whole,  to  have  preferred  it ; 
the  gossip  of  his  time  reflects  him  as  moved  by 
a  tempered  curiosity,  mitigated  by  a  love  of  ease 
and  good  food.  Voltaire,  whose  enthusiasm  could 
hardly  brook  so  measured  a  zeal,  summed  him  up, 
not  without  a  touch  of  malice,  as  '  le  discret  Fon- 
tenelle.' His  bonne  amie,  Mme.  du  Tencin, 
placing  her  hand  on  his  heart  one  day,  said  to 
him:  'Vous  riavez  Id  que  du  cerveau'  Although 
he  allowed  Mme.  de  Lambert  to  be  his  almoner, 
he  appeared  to  pride  himself  on  his  egotism.  To 
him  is  attributed  the  well-known  recipe  for  happi- 
ness— tenir  le  cceur  froid  et  Festomac  chaud.  He 
may  have  thought  it,  but  it  would  hardly  have 
been  in  keeping  with  his  discretion  to  have  said 
so.  His  wit  was  inimitable.  An  aged  lady  having 
one  day  said  to  him  :  '  It  seems  that  Providence 
has  forgotten  us  on  this  earth,'  '  Chut,  on  pourra 


6  SIX  MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

nous  entendre,'  replied  Fontenelle,  placing  his 
finger  on  his  mouth  with  an  air  of  mystery.  His 
main  characteristic  was  moderation  in  all  things,  a 
moderation  which  evidently  must  have  been  based 
on  singularly  torpid  senses.  Mme.  Geoffrin  tells  us 
that  he  never  laughed  or  wept,  he  was  never  in  a 
hurry,  and  never  even  approximated  to  losing  his 
temper.  When  he  took  an  apartment  he  left  the 
furniture  exactly  as  he  found  it,  without  changing  a 
nail.  Most  wonderful  of  all,  when  he  had  gout, 
it  was  painless ;  '  seulement  son  pied  devenait  du 
coton,  il  le  posait  sur  un  fauteuil,  et  c'etait  tout.' 

Before  proceeding  to  the  part  he  played  in 
forming  his  age,  it  will  be  useful  to  consider,  rather 
more  in  detail,  the  nature  of  that  great  change  in 
human  opinion  to  which  I  have  already  referred, 
and  which  marks  off  the  eighteenth  from  the  pre- 
ceding century.  Bossuet  gave  to  the  absolutism, 
both  civil  and  ecclesiastical,  of  his  time  a  final  and 
classical  expression  ;  in  order,  then,  to  know  what  it 
was  that  the  eighteenth  century  superseded,  it  is  to 
Bossuet  that  we  must  go.  One  of  the  clearest  heads 
and  greatest  masters  of  style  that  ever  lived,  he 
never  leaves  us  in  any  doubt  as  to  his  meaning. 
'  If,'  says  Sir  James  Stephen,  '  it  were  the  order  of 
nature  that  God  should  be  represented  upon  earth 
by  infallible  priests  and  irresponsible  kings,  it  would 
be  impossible  to  imagine  a  nobler  system  of  educa- 


FONTENELLE  7 

tion  for  a  great  king  than  that  which  Bossuet  con- 
ceived, or  a  teacher  better  suited  to  carry  it  out 
than  Bossuet  himself.'  The  education  of  the  ill- 
fated  dauphin  furnished  him  with  the  occasion  for 
the  expression  of  his  theory  of  human  life.  The 
Connaissance  de  Dieu  et  de  Soi-m£me,  the  Discours 
sur  tHistoire  Universelle,  and  the  Politique  tirte 
de  PEcriture  Sainte,  were  the  three  divisions  into 
which  his  teaching  naturally  fell,  and  these  books 
remain  for  ever  among  the  finest  examples  of  the 
constructive  power  of  human  genius  and  the  most 
important  landmarks  in  the  history  of  European 
thought.  Their  rhetoric  is  so  ample  and  so  mag- 
nificent, their  reasoning  so  close  and  so  solid,  that 
even  now  one  is  tempted  to  overlook  the  baseless- 
ness of  their  premisses,  and  can  hardly  believe  that 
so  substantial-seeming  a  fabric  melts  under  criti- 
cism into  'air,  thin  air,'  with  all  'the  cloud-capped 
towers,  the  gorgeous  palaces,  the  solemn  temples ' 
of  its  visionary  splendour. 

Renan  has  told  us  that  the  mediaeval  scholastic 
was,  in  spite  of  his  mysticism,  a  sound  rationalist, 
i.e.  he  accepted  the  fact  of  revelation  as  the  ultimate 
term  of  a  process  of  reasoning  which  started  from 
grounds  level  with  the  rest  of  experience,  and  that 
it  was  not  until  such  grounds  had  given  way,  that 
ecclesiastical  apologists  were  driven  to  '  prove  the 
divinity  of  Jesus  Christ  by  the  battle  of  Marengo.' 


8  SIX  MASTERS   IN  DISILLUSION 

Bossuet  would  have  shared  Renan's  contempt  for 
the  modern  apologists  of  '  Fideism.'  It  certainly 
would  be  hard  to  find  in  Voltaire  or  in  Tom  Paine 
a  more  uncompromising  expression  of  the  principles 
of  the  early  rationalists  than  the  following  little 
piece  of  epistemology  which  occurs  in  the  De  la 
Connaissance  de  Dieu  et  de  Soi-m$me.  '  The 
understanding  (1'entendement)  is  the  light  which 
God  has  given  us  for  our  guidance.  It  has  different 
names ;  in  its  inventive  and  penetrating  capacity  it 
is  called  spirit  (esprit) :  in  so  far  as  it  judges  and 
directs  to  truth  and  goodness,  it  is  called  reason 
and  judgment.  Reason,  in  so  far  as  it  turns  us 
from  the  true  evil  of  man,  which  is  sin,  is  called 
conscience.'  And  he  says  that  reason,  if  not 
seduced  by  passion,  is  infallible.  '  The  understand- 
ing is  never  forced  to  err,  and  never  does  so  except 
from  want  of  attention :  and  if  it  judges  wrongly  by 
following  the  senses  or  passions  derived  from  them 
:  too  readily,  it  will  correct  its  judgment  if  a  right  will 
make  it  attentive  to  its  object  and  itself'  (The 
italics  are  mine.)  Certainly  Bossuet  cannot  be  said 
to  err  in  putting  the  power  of  reason  too  low. 
What  was  it,  then,  he  lacked?  He  lacked  facts,  or 
rather  he  took  for  facts  what  were  not  facts,  and 
the  reason  he  did  so  was  that  he  had  no  criticism. 
His  superb  eloquence  and  the  rationalism  of  his 
process  blinded  him  to  the  sources  of  his  premisses, 


FONTENELLE  9 

which  were,  in  truth,  his  conclusions.  He  some- 
what naively  betrays  himself  in  his  controversy 
with  Richard  Simon,  the  Oratorian  father,  who, 
two  centuries  before  Loisy,  maintained  in  the 
Catholic  Church  the  right  of  reason  to  investigate 
the  title-deeds  of  theology.  '  Les  dates  font  tout  en 
ces  matter es  !'  he  cries.  Yes,  indeed.  All  the 
more  reason,  one  would  think,  to  subject  them  to 
the  severest  scrutiny.  Let  us,  however,  not  be 
unjust.  It  would  be  idle  and  absurd  to  blame 
Bossuet  for  his  lack  of  acquaintance  with  the  science 
of  historical  criticism ;  it  is  not  illegitimate  to 
deplore  the  spirit  of  blind  certitude  which  prevented 
him  understanding  the  nature  and  relevance  of  Pere 
Simon's  inquiries.  He  seems  to  have  regarded 
such  speculations  from  that  purely  conventional  and 
professional  point  of  view  which  the  more  educated 
Christian  pulpit  of  to-day,  whether  Catholic  or 
Protestant,  does  not  hesitate  to  disavow.  The 
view  which  Bossuet  derived  from,  among  others, 
'  quatre  ou  cinq  faits  authentiques  et  plus  clairs  que 
la  lumiere  du  soleil  (qui)  font  voir  notre  religion 
aussi  ancienne  que  le  monde' — one  gasps  at  the 
statement — was  one  of  the  most  complete  and 
universal  absolutism.  Whatever  might  be  said 
about  nature,  it  was  indeed  the  divine  order  '  that 
God  should  be  represented  upon  earth  by  infallible 
priests  and  irresponsible  kings.'  And  the  chain  of 


10          SIX  MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

such  representatives  had  never  been  broken.  '  From 
Innocent  XL,  who  fills  to-day  so  worthily  the  first 
place  in  the  Church,'  he  traces  back  that  august 
line  through  St.  Peter  and  the  Pontiffs  of  the  ancient 
Law  to  Moses  and  Aaron :  '  de  la  jusqu'a  1'origine  du 
monde !  quelle  suite,  quelle  tradition,  quel  enseigne- 
ment  merveilleux ! '  One  is  reminded  of  Pascal's 
'  Sem  qui  a  vu  Lamech,  qui  a  vu  Adam,  a  vu  aussi 
Jacob  qui  a  vu  ceux  qui  ont  vu  Moise.  Done  le 
deluge  et  la  creation  sont  vrais.'  Certainly  Bossuet 
was  right,  as  a  matter  of  tactics,  in  resenting  criti- 
cism of  the  Mosaic  authorship  of  the  Pentateuch. 
He  was  right,  that  is  to  say,  so  long  as  it  was 
possible  to  suppress  such  criticism  by  other  than 
critical  methods  :  but  although  he  knew  it  not,  the 
day  of  such  absolute  power,  whether  in  the  realm 
of  opinion  or  politics,  was  drawing  to  its  close. 
And  now  we  may  return  to  the  part  played  by 
Fontenelle  in  the  transition. 

What  that  transition  led  to  primarily  was  the 
emancipation  of  the  individual  judgment  from  the 
control  of  authority  of  any  kind.  This  emancipa- 
tion constituted  the  first  '  moment '  of  modern 
rationalism.  In  that  moment  the  individual  was 
conceived  as  self-subsisting,  infallible  in  his  under- 
standing (to  which  understanding,  precisely  repro- 
duced in  every  human  being,  '  Reality '  was  exactly 
correlative),  and  perfect  in  will,  i.e.  spontaneously 


FONTENELLE  11 

and  naturally  good.  Ignorance  and  sin,  moral  and 
intellectual  evil,  were  brought  about  by  the  environ- 
ment of  humanity,  and  were  due  to  the  institutions 
which  prevented  man's  understanding  and  will 
having  free  play.  Taken  as  a  whole  and  in  its 
maturity  this  attitude  represents  the  most  naive 
and  simple  form  of  individualistic  optimism.  Its 
philosopher  was  Voltaire  and  its  religion  was 
Deism  ;  and  the  French  Revolution  and  Kant  were 
lying  in  wait  for  it.  Though  the  apprehensions  on 
which  the  movement  was  based  were  essentially 
positive,  its  first  attitude  was  inevitably  one  of 
negation — negation  of  the  values  enshrined  in  the 
system  with  which  it  found  itself  in  conflict.  That 
system,  as  we  have  seen,  held  the  whole  of  human 
life  in  the  meshes  of  authority ;  the  first  task  of 
the  emancipators  was  then  to  dislodge  authority. 
Until  that  was  done  nothing  could  be  done.  Now 
the  phenomenal  basis  of  the  Church's  authority  was 
as  such,  unsound,  for  the  facts  on  which  it  was 
alleged  to  rest  could  not  be  proved.  Bossuet's  line 
of  communication  between  Heaven  and  Earth  was 
discovered,  on  investigation,  to  be  non-existent. 
This  was  the  position  of  the  early  rationalists,  and 
so  far  they  were  right,  and,  as  long  as  the  Church 
confined  her  apologetics  to  mere  empiricism,  she 
was  bound  to  be  beaten,  for  she  was  not  so  good 
an  empiricist  as  the  philosophes.  When,  however, 


12          SIX  MASTERS  IN  DISILLUSION 

from  being  negative,  they  became  positive,  and 
took  over  human  nature  themselves  on  the  schema- 
tism of  the  authority  of  the  understanding,  relying 
on  the  formal  contraries  of  the  Church's  ethical 
teaching,  on  i.e.  the  natural  rectitude  of  each 
human  will  as  such,  and  on  the  perfectibility,  in 
terms  of  present  experience,  of  humanity  considered 
as  an  aggregate  of  individuals,  they  failed.  Kant 
blew  up  their  naive  objectivism,  showed  that  the 
Deistic  God  who  was  conceived  as  a  part  only  of  all 
reality  was  a  mass  of  contradictions  insoluble  to 
the  individual  understanding,  while  the  Revolution 
and  its  resulting  reactions  gave  pause  to  their  social 
speculations.  So  it  comes  about  that  the  name  of 
a  pioneer  of  the  movement  like  Fontenelle  is  mainly 
associated  with  rebellion  against  the  Church. 
M.  Faguet  has  severely  criticised  his  methods. 
I  would  suggest  in  deprecation  of  his  criticism  that 
it  cannot  have  been  very  easy  at  the  time  to  see 
how  such  an  attack  could  be  led.  For  although 
ecclesiastical  authority  could  not,  in  strict  logic  and 
theology,  have  axiomatic  value,  for  its  existence 
was  given  as  a  phenomenal  fact,  based  like  others 
on  evidence,  appealing  finally  to  the  individual 
judgment,  yet  in  process  of  time  it  had  naturally 
enough  come  to  have  some  such  value  for  its 
adherents.  And,  at  the  time  of  which  I  am  writing, 
only  very  few  French  men  or  women  were  not  its 


FONTENELLE  13 

adherents.  Moreover,  on  the  Catholic  premisses, 
the  moral  values  of  life  were  inextricably  inter- 
twined with  the  assents  of  Faith  :  it  was  impossible 
to  prove  the  purity  of  the  motives  which  led  to 
their  rejection.  If  the  orthodox  were  unable  to 
impute  that  favourite  commonplace  of  the  contro- 
versial pulpit,  a  desire  for  sensual  indulgence,  to  the 
Freethinkers,  they  could  always  fall  back  upon 
pride,  an  absolutely  unanswerable  charge.  Also 
it  must  be  remembered  that  although  Louis  xiv 
had  refused,  at  the  time  of  the  Revocation  of  the 
Edict  of  Nantes,  to  re-establish  the  suppressed 
Inquisition,  the  Parliament  of  Paris  did  not  scruple 
to  use  force  in  defence  of  orthodoxy.  All  this 
rendered  necessary,  or  appeared  to  render  neces- 
sary, to  the  great  men  who  began  the  emancipation 
of  the  French  mind,  a  course  of  systematic  conceal- 
ment of  the  real  extent  of  their  dissent  from  the 
popular  creed,  which,  in  our  own  day,  would  be 
repugnant,  it  may  be  hoped,  to  both  the  defenders 
and  the  opponents  of  any  established  form  of 
Christianity. 

It  is  impossible  to  deny  that  Fontenelle  had  a 
natural  aptitude  for  the  part.  Indeed,  so  admirably 
fitted  was  he  for  it  that,  on  the  providential  theory 
of  the  apparition  of  great  men,  such  a  coincidence 
between  the  workman  and  the  task  seems  to  speak 
incontrovertibly  in  favour  of  a  special  design.  To 


14          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

say  as  much  as  this  is  to  admit  that  Fontenelle's 
character  leaves  much  to  be  desired  :  I  have 
already  pointed  out  that  it  was  not  through  the 
individual  superiority  of  their  champions  that  the 
ideas  of  the  eighteenth  century  succeeded  in 
replacing  those  of  the  preceding  one.  It  was  the 
stars  in  their  courses  that  fought  for  them,  the 
process  of  nature,  the  unconscious  dialectic  of 
things,  that  was  their  secret  accomplice. 

Fontenelle's  first  appearance  in  literature,  apart 
from  his  share  in  the  quarrel  of  the  Ancients  and 
the  Moderns,  with  which  we  are  here  hardly 
concerned,  was,  oddly  enough,  as  a  poet.  It  has 
been  ingeniously  remarked  that  while  his  ideas 
were  in  advance  of  his  time,  his  style  was  behind 
it.  This  is  true  of  his  poetry  at  least.  His 
Pastorales,  his  Bergeries  and  his  Eglogues  are  pure 
Louis  xni.  Inane  and  insipid  as  they  are,  they 
are,  however,  without  the  note  of  falseness  charac- 
teristic of  the  genre.  His  shepherds  do  not  talk 
like  poets  and  philosophers,  and  he  cleverly  avoids 
the  snare  of  the  literary  convention  of  rusticity. 
This  is  something  to  be  thankful  for,  but  not  to  be 
false  is  not  enough  for  art.  His  Coryns  and 
Phebes  are  pure  nullities.  They  simply  do  not 
exist  at  all.  In  his  Discours  sur  la  nature  de 
tliglogue  he  naively  remarks  :  '  La  po£sie  pastorale 
n'a  pas  grand  charme  si  elle  ne  roule  que  sur  les 


FONTENELLE  15 

choses  de  la  campagne.  Entendre  parler  de 
brebis  et  de  chevres  cela  n'a  rien  par  soi-meme  qui 
puisse  plaire.'  The  opinion  is  defensible,  but 
seems  out  of  place  on  the  lips  of  a  pastoral  poet. 
He  appears  to  have  seen  only  one  thing  in  the 
'  simple  life,'  namely  leisure,  and  judges,  in  his 
dispassionate  way,  that  this  would  probably  lead  to 
an  unusual  development  of  amativeness.  So  he 
gives  us  scenes  of  a  cool  and  measured  gallantry, 
in  which  neither  his  own  nor  his  reader's  interest 
is  ever  for  a  moment  seriously  engaged.  One 
imagines  him  reading  them  aloud  to  Mme.  du 
Tencin  or  Mme.  de  Lambert,  punctuated  by  the 
handling  of  his  snuff-box,  and  an  occasional 
drawing-room  smirk.  Truly,  '  Cest  une  chose 
dune  tristesse  morne,  que  les  juvenilia  dun  homme 
qui  ria  jamais  eu  de  jeunesse'  It  is  unnecessary 
even  to  mention  his  tragedies,  which  are  the 
productions,  says  M.  Faguet,  of  a  man  who  is  the 
nephew  of  Corneille,  but  who  appears  to  be  his 
uncle.  Fontenelle  was  clever  enough  to  realise  in 
time  that  he  had  mistaken  his  vocation.  Perhaps 
it  came  home  to  him  when  he  was  correcting 
the  proofs  of  his  fourth  Eclogue,  in  which  occurs 
what  is  surely  the  most  unpoetical  line  ever  written 
in  metre  : 

1  Quand  on  a  le  coeur  tendre,  il  ne  faut  pas  qu'on  aime.' 

La  Bruyere,  who   hated   him,  gave   him  a   place 


16          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

among  his  '  Caracteres '  as  Cydias.  '  Cydias  (est) 
bel  esprit :  c'est  sa  profession.  II  a  une  enseigne, 
un  atelier,  des  ouvrages  de  commande,  et  des 
compagnes  qui  travaille  sous  lui.  Prose,  vers,  que 
voulez-vous  ?  il  rdussit  egalement  en  Tun  et  en 
1'autre.  Demandez-lui  des  lettres  de  consolation, 
ou  sur  une  absence,  il  les  entreprendra ;  prenez  les 
toutes  faites  et  entrez  dans  son  magasin,  il  y  a  a 
choisir.'  There  is  this  amount  of  truth  under  La 
Bruyere's  rather  savage  attack,  that  Fontenelle, 
while  entirely  devoid  of  enthusiasm,  except  on  one 
subject  which  we  will  shortly  consider,  possessed 
so  supple  a  brain  as  to  produce  the  effect  of  a 
universal  intelligence.  As  a  poet  he  failed,  nor 
need  his  failure  surprise  us,  for  more  than  a  supple 
brain  is  required  for  the  production  of  poetry. 
The  fact  is  that  he  was  a  characteristic  and 
magnificent  man  of  letters,  being,  indeed',  the  first 
specimen  of  that  type  which  was  to  play  so 
important  a  part  throughout  the  eighteenth  century. 
Now  the  man  of  letters,  as  such,  does  not  need  to 
be  an  original  thinker,  still  less  need  he  be  a 
creative  artist.  On  the  other  hand  he  requires,  in 
order  to  fulfil  his  functions  in  the  republic  of  the 
mind,  a  quick  and  facile  intelligence,  apt  to  seize 
the  finer  shades  of  opinion,  all  of  which  he  should 
be  ready  to  welcome  in  turn.  For  he  must  be 
without  prejudices  of  any  kind,  which,  in  the 


FONTENELLE  17 

average  state  of  human  nature,  is  tantamount  to 
saying  he  must  eschew  personal  convictions.     He 
is  skilled  to  detect  the  real  trend  of  ideas ;  among 
contemporary  notions  he  readily,  and,  as  it  were, 
instinctively,  distinguishes  those  that  are  pregnant 
with  the  future  from  merely  associational  survivals. 
He  is  to  the  thinkers  who  are  the  creative  forces  of 
the  time,  what  the  /tatt/*-writer  is  to  the  moral 
philosopher,  he  circulates  the  small  change  of  their 
ideas.      He  can  only  permit  himself  one  passion, 
curiosity :  but  the  more  he  has  of  that  the  better. 
Fontenelle  was  all  this  in  a  supreme  degree.      I 
have  said  that  he  had  one  enthusiasm.     There  was  / 
one  thing  in  which  that  dilettante,  indifferent  spirit/   ; 
really  did  believe,  and  that  one  thing  was  science. 
Here  he  showed  the  flair  of  the   perfect  man  of 
letters,  in  recognising,  almost  at  its  birth,  the  new 
energy   yphich   was   to    play   such    a   part   in    the 
immediate    future,    while,   at    the   same   time,    he 
gratified  his  curiosity,  the  most  fundamental  and 
serious  tendency  of  his  nature.     Already,  in  1680, 
when  St.  Simon  had  set  the  fashion  to  the  Court  of 
an  occasional  retreat  in  the  austere  cloisters  of  de 
Ranee,  Fontenelle  was  in  the  habit  of  disappearing 
for  several  days  at  a  time.     He  was  not  at  La 
Trappe,  but  in  a  little  house  in  the  Faubourg  St. 
Jacques.     Here  he  used  to  meet  and  confer  with 
the   mathematician   Varignon,   the  Abbe    de    St. 


18          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

Pierre,  and  other  scientific  persons.  This  little 
house  was,  indeed,  the  cradle  of  the  eighteenth 
century  in  France.  If  Bayle  provided  in  his 
dictionary  an  arsenal  of  sceptical  arguments  for  the 
philosophes  to  direct  against  the  Church,  it  was 
from  the  cenacle  of  the  Faubourg  St.  Jacques  that 
the  positive  side  of  the  movement  proceeded. 
That  positive  side  aimed  at  what  all  the  scepticism 
in  the  world  never  could  have  effected,  the 
substitution  of  the  prestige  of  science  for  that  of 
I  the  Church.  It  is  often  said  that  Fontenelle, 
[unlike  those  robust  dogmatists  who  carried  the 
I  movement  which  he  had  helped  to  initiate  to  its 
; maturity,  was  a  sceptic.  It  is  very  much  a 
question  of  words.  All  who  question  the  values  of 
popular  theology  or  politics  are  apt  to  incur  the 
charge.  For  it  is  the  nature  of  those  values  to 
be  held  by  those  who  maintain  them  with  such 
immediacy  of  conviction  that  discussion  of  any  kind 
is  apt  to  seem  an  irrelevant  impertinence,  more  or 
less  certainly  of  the  nature  of  doubt.  I  do  not  think 
that  Fontenelle  was  in  doubt  on  the  subject  of 
Christian  theology,  as  the  tradition  of  the  Church 
of  his  day  presented  it.  In  spite  of  his  cautious 
mode  of  expression,  of  the  modesty — or  diplomacy 
—  with  which  he  refrained  from  pushing  his 
arguments  to  their  legitimate  conclusion,  from 
committing  himself  to  an  open  breach  with  ecclesi- 


FONTENELLE  19       , 

astical  authority,  there  is,  I  think,  no  sort  of  doubt 
that  he  positively,  and  with  full  conviction,  rejected 
the  whole  system.  The  Fathers  of  the  Society  of 
Jesus,  who  are  not  supposed  to  be  particularly 
stupid  people,  were  quick  to  detect  the  '  essential 
impiety'  of  his  Histoire  des  Oracles,  which  is, 
ostensibly,  a  defence  of  pure  religion  from  the 
ill-informed  zeal  of  its  misguided  advocates.  Nay, 
we  must  go  further.  Not  only  do  I  think  that 
Fontenelle  was  definitely  anti-Christian,  but  it 
seems  unquestionable  that  his  mind,  his  tempera- 
ment, his  character,  call  it  what  you  will,  was 
incurably  hostile  to  religion  of  any  kind.  He  did 
not  accept  the  Church's  Messiah,  and  felt  no  sort 
of  necessity  to  look  for  another.  The  good 
Fathers  were  right,  his  impiety  was  essential.  To 
slightly  alter  a  well-known  ecclesiastical  formula, 
he  may  be  said  to  have  been  invincibly  irreligious. 
This  appears  I  think  very  clearly  in  his  Entretiens 
sur  la  Pluralite1  des  Mondes,  which  is  interesting  as 
being  one  of  the  first  attempts  at  the  popularisation 
of  science.  It  was  published  in  1686.  Fontenelle 
says  in  the  preface  that  he  asks  the  same  attention 
from  ladies  in  order  to  understand  all  he  has  to 
tell  them — 'tout  ce  systeme  de  philosophic' — as 
is  required  to  enjoy  the  Princesse  de  Cleves.  And 
so  clear  is  his  exposition,  that  his  astronomy  reads 
like  a  novel.  The  book  had  an  immediate  and 


20          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

immense  success.  Toutes  ces  danies  devoured  it 
eagerly,  which  shows  the  ground  covered  in  fifteen 
years  since  the  publication  of  the  Femmes  Savantes. 
In  1671  the  Entretiens  would  have  died  of  ridicule. 
The  form  is  very  characteristic.  The  astronomer 
shows  the  heavens  at  night  to  a  charming  mar- 
quise, whose  questions  and  comments  enable  him 
to  relieve  the  strain  of  the  reader's  attention,  by 
neatly  turned  compliments  and  gallant  epigrams. 
The  marquise  having  remarked  that  the  beauty  of 
the  day  is  that  of  a  brilliant  blonde,  while  the 
beauty  of  the  night  possesses  the  more  touching 
quality  of  the  brunette,  her  instructor  replies  :  '  J'en 
conviens :  mais  en  recompense  une  blonde  comme 
vous  me  ferait  encore  mieux  rever  que  la  plus  belle 
nuit  du  monde  avec  toute  sa  beaute  brune.'  The 
little  book  is  not,  however,  made  up  of  such  courtly 
trifling.  It  goes  far,  very  far.  '  II  serait  embaras- 
sant  en  theologie  qu'il  y  eut  des  hommes  qui  ne 
descendissent  point  d'Adam  .  .  .  mais  je  ne  mets 
dans  la  lune  que  des  habitants  qui  ne  sont  point 
des  hommes.'  A  valuable  concession  indeed  to  a 
theologian  inclined  to  embarrassment.  This  insidi- 
ous remark  is  a  good  instance  of  Fontenelle's  anti- 
i  theological  tactics.  But  it  is  not  in  such  feline 
strokes  of  the  paw,  that  the  bias  of  the  book  is  most 
apparent.  It  is  rather  in  the  complete  absence  of 
any  religious  sentiment,  or  even  poetical  emotion  at 


FONTENELLE  21 

all.  The  author  shows  himself  blankly  unreceptive 
of  the  feelings  which,  a  hundred  years  later,  would 
stir  the  imagination  of  a  Kant,  when  contemplating 
the  starry  heavens.  The  Origine  des  Fables  and 
the  Histoire  des  Oracles  are  masterpieces  of  quiet 
malice.  He  tells  us  in  the  Origine  des  Fables  that 
the  history  of  all  nations,  Greeks,  Gauls,  Romans, 
Americans  and  Chinese,  begins  with  fables  .  .  .  '  all 
nations,  that  is,  except  the  Chosen  People,  among 
whom  a  special  attention  of  Providence  has  pre- 
served the  truth.'  Here  the  very  qualification 
which  saves  the  orthodoxy  of  the  statement  is 
made  to  gently  insinuate  its  own  improbability. 
In  the  Histoire  des  Oracles,  a  work  adapted  from 
the  Dutch  of  one  Van  Dale,  he  establishes  that  the 
Pagan  oracles  were  not  the  work  of  demons,  and 
did  not  cease  at  the  death  of  Christ.  The  thesis 
seems  innocent  enough,  but  Fontenelle's  treatment 
of  it  leaves  the  reader  with  the  conviction  that 
demons  and  oracles  of  every  kind  are  more  than 
suspicious  :  a  conviction  which  he  must  be  slow- 
witted  indeed  not  to  be  inclined  to  apply  to  Rome 
as  much  as  to  Delphi.  Yet  nothing  has  been  said 
that  would  formally  justify  such  a  conclusion. 
Certainly  his  attack  on  revelation  lost  nothing  in 
acuteness  for  being  disguised  under  the  mantle  of 
an  exquisitely  pudic  orthodoxy  that  shrank  from 
the  contagion  of  superstition. 


22          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

Fontenelle  reaches  his  greatest  height  of  para- 
doxical brilliancy  in  his  well-known  Dialogues  des 
Marts,  published  in  1686.  Of  this  book  Voltaire 
wrote  to  Frederic  in  1751,  '  Le  defaut  de  Fon- 
tenelle, c'est  qu'il  veut  toujours  avoir  de  1'esprit. 
C'est  toujours  lui  qu'on  voit,  et  jamais  ses  heros ; 
il  leur  fait  dire  le  contraire  de  ce  qu'ils  devraient 
dire,  il  soutient  le  pour  et  le  contre,  il  ne  veut  que 
briller.'  Was  that,  after  all,  so  grave  a  fault,  good 
Master  ?  And  does  the  criticism  come  well  from  the 
author  of  S##/and  other  historical  face'ties  ?  How- 
ever we  may  explain  this  unfavourable  judgment, 
and  there  is  more  than  one  alternative  to  its  being 
the  expression  of  unbiassed  opinion,  it  remains  a  fact 
that  Voltaire  himself  never  wrote  anything  wittier 
than  these  imaginary  conversations.  Their  verve 
is  inimitable,  and  never  flags  for  a  moment,  there  is 
not  a  dull  line  in  all  the  forty.  Fontenelle  chooses 
the  most  delightfully  incongruous  companions  for 
the  discussion  of  every  subject  under  the  sun. 
Faustina  proves  to  Brutus  that  her  conduct  to 
Marcus  Aurelius  was  of  a  most  disinterested  de- 
scription and  was  dictated  by  the  very  same  motives 
which  led  Brutus  to  murder  his  friend.  Erasti- 
trates,  a  physician  of  antiquity,  considerably  damps 
the  enthusiasm  of  Harvey,  over  the  benefits  which 
his  discovery  has  conferred  on  mankind,  by  the 
remark  that  he  does  not  observe  any  diminution  in 


FONTENELLE  23 

the  number  of  annual  arrivals  on  the  shores  of 
Styx.  Socrates  explains  to  Montaigne  that  anti- 
quity was  a  poor  affair  after  all,  and  that  there 
were  just  as  many  fools  and  knaves  in  the  Athens 
of  his  day,  as  in  the  Paris  which  Montaigne  knew. 

The  Dialogues  gives  us  the  answer  to  the  ques-  \ 
tion  of  Fontenelle's  scepticism.     As  we  have  seen,  | 
he  was   no  sceptic   in  matters  of  religion,   being  : 
definitely  anti-religious  on  positive  grounds ;  nor 
was  he  a  sceptic  in  what  he  called  experimental 
philosophy,  i.e.  science,  where  he  found  indeed  his 
one  point  of  certitude.     Where  he  was  a  sceptic 
was  in   morals.      Not  that  he  doubted   that   the, 
guidance  of  reason  was  what  men  required  in  order 
to  be  good  and  happy,  but  he  more  than  suspected  • 
that  the  nature  of  things  did  not  in  fact  permit1 
such  a  result,  except  in  so  small  a  minority  of  cases 
as  to  leave  the  world,   in  the  main,  a  stage  for 
knaves  and  fools.     The  wise  should  be  encouraged 
to  get  what  amusement  they  could  from  the  spec- 
tacle.     He  used   to  say  in  later  years,  that  the 
amount  of  enthusiasm  around  him  frightened  him. 
The  important  thing  to  note  about  this  tempera- 
mental attitude — for,  although  he  may  have  sup- 
ported it  by  argument,  it  was  that  au  fond — is  its 
difference  from  that  of  the  second  generation  of 
the  eighteenth  century,  of  the  philosophers  who 
carried   the   movement  of  emancipation   into   the 


24          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

political  sphere.  One  sees  the  sort  of  imaginary 
dialogue  which  Fontenelle  would  have  put  on  the 
lips  of,  say,  Turgot  and  Machiavelli. 

His  other  important  work  is  his  Mdmoires  of  the 
Academy  of  the  Sciences,  of  which  he  was  per- 
petual secretary.  It  was  one  of  his  duties  to  write 
dloges  of  the  deceased  academicians.  For  once 
Cydias  becomes  almost  enthusiastic  and  really  elo- 
quent. He  realised  the  dignity  and  beauty  of 
these  workers'  lives,  and  he  makes  us  feel  them 
in  a  series  of  short  biographies  which  really  can 
hardly  be  too  highly  praised.  The  simple  virtues 
of  these  great  men,  their  probity,  their  immense 
and  peaceful  labours,  their  delightful  piety,  like 
that  of  Ozanan,  who  said  it  belonged  to  the  Sor- 
bonne  to  dispute,  to  the  Pope  to  decide,  and  to  the 
mathematician  to  go  to  Heaven  in  a  perpendicular 
straight  line ;  or  their  simplicity,  like  that  of  the 
great  chemist  who  said  of  the  Regent:  'Je  le 
connais,  j'ai  frequente  dans  son  laboratoire.  Oh, 
c'est  un  rude  travailleur ! ' — all  the  features  of  their 
blameless  existences  are  lovingly  and  carefully 
detailed.  We  are  surprised  to  find  another  Fon- 
tenelle, very  different  to  the  author  of  the  Dialogues 
des  Morts,  a  Fontenelle  who  does  not  sneer,  who 
has  almost  forgotten  to  be  epigrammatic.  Almost, 
but  not  quite.  We  are  told  that  M.  Dodart 
'  accompagnait  de  toutes  les  lumieres  de  la  raison 


FONTENELLE  25 

la  respectable  obscuritd  de  la  foi.'  Science  had 
seized  him,  and  having  seized  him  never  let  him 
go.  His  nimble  brain  moved  easily  in  what  he 
called  experimental  philosophy.  And  it  is  in  his  j 
services  to  science — not  the  services  of  an  inde- 
pendent discoverer,  but  the  no  less  necessary  ones 
of  the  writer  who  familiarises  the  world  with  the 
results  obtained  by  specialists  in  their  laboratory 
or  at  their  telescope — that  his  real  contribution  to 
his  time  and  the  transitional  movement  of  his  time 
consists.  He  died  happily  and  peacefully,  aged 
ninety-nine  years  and  eleven  months,  with  the 
characteristic  words  on  his  lips:  'J'eprouve  une 
difficult^  d'etre.'  And  the  Academic  des  Sciences 
has  never  had  such  a  good  secretary  since. 


26          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 


PROSPER    MERIMEE 

THE  centenary  of  Prosper  Merimee  four  years  ago, 
passed  practically  unnoticed,  which  is  perhaps  what 
that  eminent  person,  who  had  an  almost  comical 
horror  of  popular  appreciation,  would  have  liked. 
One  can  imagine  the  sort  of  letter  he  would  have 
written  on  September  27,  1903,  to  some  'Unknown 
Friend'  among  the  shades  in  description  of  the 
celebration  of  his  memory,  if,  in  fact,  his  com- 
patriots had  remembered  him.  As  it  is,  they 
saved  him  the  trouble.  '  A  few  words '  were  mur- 
mured by  that  veteran  Professor  of  the  Sorbonne, 
M.  Emile  Faguet,  an  article  appeared  here  and 
there  in  the  French  press,  but  these  voices  had 
little,  if  any,  echo.  Perhaps  the  official  world  of 
M.  Combes  was  detached  from  such  purely 
academic  interests.  The  fact  is  that  Merime'e, 
alive  or  dead,  is  not  available  for  the  objects  of 
popular  propaganda.  Both  as  a  man  and  as  an 
artist  his  appeal  was,  and  still  is,  to  a  small  circle. 
It  may  be  worth  our  while  to  try  and  discover  in 
what  the  value  of  that  appeal  consists. 


PROSPER   MERIMEE  27 

The  extreme  conscientiousness  and  integrity  of 
soul  of  the  artist  renders  it  justifiable  to  seek  that 
value  not  only  in  his  written  word.  MerimeVs 
personality  was  a  work  of  art  as  sincerely  con- 
ceived, as  deftly  composed,  as  logically  worked  out 
as  any  of  his  own  stories.  So  his  personality  may 
come,  in  fairness,  to  be  considered  as  more  than  an 
essential  element  in — rather  as  one,  and  that  an 
essential  aspect  of — his  contribution,  the  'moi 
haissable '  (so  great  an  artist  was  he  in  life  as  well 
as  letters),  being  as  dexterously  concealed  in  the 
daily  habit  of  the  man  of  the  world,  the  mondain, 
as  in  the  pages  of  the  writer. 

It  would  doubtless  have  annoyed  him  exces- 
sively to  be  told  that  the  key  to  the  success  with 
which  he  handled  such  a  multiplicity  and  com- 
plexity of  interests,  was  to  be  found  in  the  pages 
of  the  Imitation  of  Christ ;  yet  few  men  have 
carried  out  so  consistently  the  exhortation,  '  Sibi 
unitus  et  simplificatus  esse.'  I  shall  therefore 
make  no  apology  for  adopting  here  a  method  of 
criticism  which  is,  in  most  cases,  rightly  held  to  be 
illegitimate.  Artistic  creation  is  nearly  always  a 
special  function  of  the  brain,  and,  for  the  most 
part,  unrelated,  at  least  obviously,  to  the  rest  of  the 
artist's  life. 

Prosper  Merimee  was  born  a  hundred  years  ago 
on  September  28th.  His  father,  Jean-FranQois 


28          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

Leonor,  was  a  painter  of  mediocre  quality  who, 
after  some  moderate  success  with  the  brush,  had 
intelligence  enough  to  recognise  his  own  calibre 
and  to  resign  the  practice  of  painting  for  its  study. 
He  became  professor  at  the  Iicole  Polytechnique 
and  Secretary  of  the  Ecole  des  Beaux-Arts.  He 
was  the  author  of  a  history  of  oil  painting,  and 
spent  much  of  his  time  in  his  laboratory  experi- 
menting on  the  chemical  constituents  of  colours. 
Jean- Francois,  when  in  middle  life,  met  in  a  pension, 
where  he  gave  lessons,  a  girl  named  Anna  Moreau, 
neither  rich  nor  beautiful,  whom  he  married.  The 
mother  of  Prosper  would  seem  to  have  been  a 
remarkable  woman.  M.  Filon  describes  her  as 
'  un  caractere  ferme,  un  esprit  prompt,  de  nature 
seche  et  gaie.'  He  adds  that  she  was  peacefully 
and  invincibly  irreligious,  the  reverse  of  senti- 
mental, and  very  faithful  to  her  duties  and  her 
affections.  She  painted  with  some  skill,  and  was 
a  fascinating  raconteuse.  Her  portraits  of  children 
gained  her  a  certain  reputation,  and  are  said  to 
have  owed  part  of  their  success  to  the  way  in 
which  she  fixed  the  attention  of  her  young  models 
by  the  delightful  stories  with  which  she  would 
beguile  the  hours  of  sitting.  In  a  word,  she  was 
just  the  mother  indicated  for  Merimee  on  Schopen- 
hauer's theory  of  heredity.  At  least  it  would 
appear  that  Prosper  inherited  his  brain  from  her  ; 


PROSPER  M£RIM£E  29 

and  that  not  merely  in  the  sense  of  intellectual 
power  alone,  but  also  in  the  whole  turn  and  cast  of 
his  mind.  In  her  we  see  his  love  of  anecdote 
(his  best  work  consists  really  of  exquisitely  fin- 
ished anecdote),  his  horror  of  sentimentality,  of 
pkurnicherie,  his  aversion  to  religion  of  all  kinds. 

In  1821  Frangois  Merime'e  wrote  to  his  friend 
Fabre,  a  painter  of  Montpellier,  who  had  succeeded 
Alfieri  in  the  affections  of  the  Countess  of  Albany  : 
'  J'ai  un  grand  fils  de  dix-huit  ans  dont  je  voudrais 
bien  faire  un  avocat  .  .  .  toujours  dlevd  a  la 
maison,  il  a  de  bonnes  mceurs  et  de  1'instruction.' 

Reading  for  the  Bar  in  Paris,  as  in  London,  is 
not  incompatible  with  other  and  more  romantic 
interests,  and  the  future  Academician  found  time 
to  make  many  literary  friends.  J.  J.  Ampere  and 
Albert  Stapfer  were  among  his  intimates.  Stapfer 
was  an  interesting  and  charming  person,  the  son 
of  the  Swiss  minister.  He  represented  a  type  far 
too  rare  among  us  to-day,  though  frequently  to  be 
met  with  a  hundred  years  ago,  being  indeed  a 
survival  from  the  eighteenth  century.  Endowed 
with  considerable  literary  ability,  he  seems  to  have 
lacked  personal  ambition  or  the  desire  for  money, 
and  was  content  to  remain  a  spectator  of  the 
battles  of  letters,  excelling  in  intimacy  as  a  wise 
critic  and  brilliant  talker.  Such  men  are  the  salt 
of  society ;  in  the  eighteenth  century  they  alone 


30          SIX  MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

constituted  the  literary  'public.'  Me'rime'e  used  to 
frequent  the  house  of  Stapfer's  father,  now  retired 
from  diplomacy  and  definitely  settled  in  Paris  in 
the  midst  of  the  intellectual  society  he  loved. 

Here  the  'jeunes'  used  to  assemble.  While 
their  elders  counted  their  honours  at  whist,  they 
would  gather  in  a  corner  round  a  stout,  dark, 
square-faced  man  with  little  flaming  eyes.  It  was 
no  less  a  personage  than  Stendhal.  Sometimes 
his  hearers  were  distracted  by  the  fluent  rhetoric 
of  a  young  professor  of  philosophy,  Victor  Cousin, 
on  which  occasions  the  great  man  would  grunt 
with  impatience  and  growl  forth  the  characteristic 
appreciation :  '  Depuis  Bossuet  personne  n'a  joue 
de  la  blague  serieuse  comme  cet  homme-la  ! ' 

And  here  we  must  dwell  for  a  moment  on  the 
influence  of  Stendhal  over  Merimee,  who,  fortu- 
nately, has  left  us  an  invaluable  document  on  his 
one  and  only  master.  These  few  pages  on  Henri 
Beyle  in  his  Portraits  Historiques  et  Littdraires, 
tell  us  quite  as  much  about  their  writer  as  their 
subject.  Our  criticisms  of  our  friends  not  un- 
frequently  represent  the  reactions  they  produce  in 
ourselves,  unconsciously  objectified.  Me'rime'e  in 
the  particular  case  has  admitted  as  much  to  one 
of  his  unknown  correspondents,  though  he  has 
declared  in  his  published  study  of  Stendhal  that, 
except  for  certain  literary  preferences  and  aver- 


PROSPER   MERIMEE  31 

sions,  they  had  scarcely  an  idea  in  common.  That 
this  should  have  been  so,  at  least  at  the  moment 
of  their  first  meeting  in  1820,  is  not  surprising, 
Beyle  being  then  about  forty,  and  Merimee  barely 
eighteen. 

Beyle's  formula  is  somewhat  complex.     A  true 
disciple  of  the  eighteenth  century,  of  Diderot  and 
the  Encyclopaedists,  he  was  nevertheless  the  father 
of  French    nineteenth-century  literature   and   the 
authentic   founder    of    the    Romantic    movement. 
Victor  Hugo  did  but  invent  the  mediaeval  staging 
that  gave  that  movement  its  vogue  in  the  drawing- 
rooms  of  the  Restoration,  and  it  was  the  splendour 
of  his  genius  that  caused  the  play  to  become  identi- 
fied with   the  scenery  in  the  public  imagination. 
There  was  no  necessary  connection  between  the 
ideals  of  Christianity  and  the  Romantic  movement. 
Indeed  the  spirit  of  its  founder  was  emphatically 
anti-Christian  in  the  eighteenth-century  manner  of 
D'Alembert,  Condorcet,  and  Voltaire.     The  move- 
ment was  primarily  a  reaction  against  the  conven- 
tions which  had  enslaved  the  French  drama,  and, 
so  far,  represented  the  claim  of  literature  to  find 
its  value  in  a  true  observation  and  sincere  render- 
ing of  human  life.     To  be  a  'Romantic'  in  1824 
meant  that  one  despised  the  sacred  '  Unities,'  that 
one  laughed  at  the  Abb6  Auger ;  that  one  had  the 
temerity  to  find  Racine  conventional  and  unsatis- 


32         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

fying.  Beyle's  pamphlet,  Racine  and  Shakespeare, 
in  which  the  latter  poet's  truthfulness  of  observa- 
tion, and  daring  disregard  of  the  axioms  of  a 
pedantic  classicism  are  contrasted  with  the  former's 
rhetorical  representation  of  the  life  of  the  passions 
in  a  passionless  vacuum  of  abstraction,  was  the 
manifesto  of  the  first  period  of  the  Romantic 
movement,  as  the  preface  of  Hugo's  Cromwell 
was  of  the  second. 

A  foolish  person  once  asked  Beyle  his  pro- 
fession. '  Observateur  du  cceur  humain,'  replied 
the  novelist ;  and  it  is  said  that  the  foolish  person 
fled,  convinced  that  the  reply  was  a  euphemism 
for  police-spy.  The  phrase  certainly  stands  not 
unfitly  on  the  threshold  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
as  the  formula  of  nearly  all  that  century's  literary 
production.  To  it  may  be  attached  not  only  the 
works  of  the  Romantics  properly  so-called,  but  the 
'  roman  de  mceurs,'  the  psychological  novel,  and 
the  labours  of  the  self-styled  naturalists.  In  per- 
sonal character  Beyle  seems  to  have  been  a 
puzzling  mass  of  contradictions.  He  claimed  to 
be  always  guided  by  '  la  Z,0gique '  (as  he  empha- 
sised the  word  in  pronunciation),  but  never, 
according  to  Merimee,  was  there  a  more  impulsive 
and  spontaneous  creature.  He  imagined  that  he 
had  discovered  his  ideal  of  passion  (up  to  which 
he  lived  as  well  as  wrote,  in  Italy).  He  had 


PROSPER   MERIMEE  33 

doubtless  found  there  abundant  materials  for  its 
incarnation,  but  the  ideal  is  as  old  and  universal 
as  the  '  Fall.'  His  views  on  this  subject  were, 
in  fact,  as  elementary  as  they  well  could  be  in 
a  civilised  man,  and  his  appreciation  of  women 
was  precisely  on  a  par  with  his  criticism  of 
religion.  As  to  the  latter,  whatever  they  might 
say,  the  professors  of  all  forms  of  religion  were 
necessarily  hypocrites.  His  curious  belief  in  the 
absolute  equality  of  the  human  mind  precluded  the 
charitable  alternative — fools.  The  parallel  may 
be  left  to  complete  itself.  It  is  nevertheless  fair 
to  note  that  the  experience  which  was  to  Beyle 
the  crown  of  life — '  Beyle  croyait  qu'il  n'y  avait  de 
bonheur  possible  en  ce  monde  que  pour  un  homme 
amoureux,'  writes  Me'rime'e — was  always  to  him 
psychological  and  emotional  rather  than  purely 
physical ;  it  was  always  love — of  sorts— not  vice. 
In  all  this  he  was  a  true  child  of  the  eighteenth 
century.  That  century  dealt  invariably  in  absolute 
judgments.  Austere  philosophers  like  d'Alem- 
bert  and  Condorcet  would  have  endorsed  Beyle's 
religious  views,  and  would  have  had,  at  least,  a 
theoretic  sympathy  with  his  attitude  in  sexual 
matters.  As  regards  the  criticism  of  religions, 
the  glimmerings  of  a  genuine  historical  method 
had  not  dawned  on  their  consciousness,  and  the 
Christian  theory  of  continence,  which  they  re- 

c 


34          SIX  MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

garded  not  altogether  unjustifiably  as  in  practice 
the  supreme  hypocrisy  of  the  Church,  was  to  them 
a  very  /3SeXuy/Aa  rrj?  e/oi?/u,aJcr€a>s  of  the  human  spirit. 

It  is  easy  to  point  out  the  insufficiency  of  the 
anti-religious  dogmatism  of  the  Encyclopaedists. 
Here,  however,  we  are  not  concerned  with  philo- 
sophy for  its  own  sake,  but  only  as  a  social 
element  in  reaction. 

The  cataclysm  of  the  Revolution  had  buried  the 
ancien  regime,  and  with  it,  for  a  time  at  least,  the 
lofty  hopes  which  had  animated  many  of  the 
thinkers  who  had  unconsciously  done  most  to 
render  possible  that  time  of  terror.  The  Napo- 
leonic epic  intoxicated  the  opening  years  of  the 
new  century  with  a  chalice  of  blood  and  glory : 
Europe  awoke  sceptical  and  weary  after  the 
double  nightmare.  And  France,  who  had  given 
this  terrible  object-lesson  to  the  rest  of  the  world, 
was  no  less  disillusioned.  Now  M£rim6e  was  a 
prince  of  '  d6sillusionn£s.' 

Sainte-Beuve  heard  from  the  lips  of  Madame 
Merimee  an  anecdote  of  Prosper's  childhood  which 
seemed  to  him  to  give  the  key  to  his  character. 
He  committed  some  childish  fault  at  the  age  of 
five,  which  induced  his  mother  to  place  him  en 
penitence  outside  the  door  of  the  studio  where  she 
was  working.  Through  the  door  the  child  im- 
plored her  pardon,  making  the  most  convincing 


PROSPER  MERIMEE  35 

protestations  of  contrition.  His  mother  paid  no 
attention.  At  last  he  opened  the  door,  and 
dragged  himself  towards  her  on  his  knees  in  so 
grotesquely  pathetic  an  attitude  that  she  could 
not  prevent  herself  bursting  into  laughter.  He 
changed  his  tone,  and  said,  rising :  '  Eh  bien, 
puisqu'on  se  moque  de  moi,  je  ne  demanderai 
jamais  plus  pardon ! '  He  kept,  says  Sainte-Beuve, 
his  resolution  only  too  well.  And  his  fidelity  to  it 
was  the  true  source  of  his  profound  irony.  Years 
afterwards  Sainte-Beuve  added  to  his  note  of 
the  anecdote  a  last  reflection :  '  S'il  avait  su  le 
Grec  a  cet  age,  il  aurait  pu  prendre  la  devise  qu'il 
porta  grave"e  sur  un  cachet :  Me/xj^o-1  amo-reiv, 
Souviens-toi  de  m^fier.' 

We  may  accept  the  story  for  what  it  may  be 
worth,  not  forgetting  that  distrust  of  men  and 
things  was  in  the  psychological  climate  into  which 
Merime"e  was  born.  Kant  seemed  to  have  clipped 
for  ever  the  wings  of  philosophy;  post- Kantian 
idealism  had  not  yet  attained  its  droit  de  citt  in  the 
commonwealth  of  European  thought,  and  if  it  had, 
it  may  be  doubted  whether  so  cautious  and  cool  a 
head  as  Me"rimeVs  would  have  yielded  to  its  seduc- 
tions. The  apparently  appalling  results  of  popular 
enthusiasm  in  the  holiest  of  all  causes — the  cause 
of  them  that  sit  in  darkness,  and  in  the  shadow  of 
death — had  not  been  such  as  to  encourage  confi- 


36          SIX  MASTERS  IN  DISILLUSION 

dence  in  the  immanent  forces  at  work  in  the  human 
process.  The  old  comely  universe  over  which, 
with  benedictory  episcopal  hands,  the  '  Pater  de 
ccelis  Deus '  of  Christian  tradition  had  presided,  on 
the  whole  benignly,  was  swept  away,  and  the 
promise  of  the  new  Heaven  and  Earth  was  but  a 
faltering  one  at  best.  In  that  old  world  where,  in 
spite  of  superficial  disruptions,  such  as  Black  Deaths 
and  Thirty  Years'  Wars,  all  was  really  secure, 
steadied  by  the  Arms  of  the  Eternal,  it  had  been 
possible,  it  had  come  to  many  naturally,  to  live 
gracious  and  dignified  lives  of  unremitting  toil, 
serenely  confident  in  a  providential  disposition  of 
the  fruits  of  their  labours. 

The  '  fruits  of  philosophy '  had  just  recently  been 
bitter  in  the  mouths  of  Frenchmen  of  that  day. 
Reaction  or  disillusion  seemed  the  only  alternatives 
that  lay  before  them.  As  a  matter  of  fact  Merimee 
resigned  himself  to  both.  The  stifling  of  French 
liberties  by  Louis  Napoleon's  coup  dEtat  awoke  no 
protest  from  him,  and  he  became  a  Senator  of  that 
prince's  short-lived  Empire  and  Inspector  of 
National  Monuments,  while  his  art,  as  we  shall 
now  proceed  to  see,  was  based  on  profound  dis- 
illusion. Disillusion  is  a  term  which  depends  for 
its  value  on  its  context ;  it  may  mean  gain  or  loss  ; 
what  was  the  balance  in  the  case  of  Merimee  ? 

He  was  born  into  a  society  but  recently  emanci- 


PROSPER   MERIMEE  37 

pated  from  the  most  effective  and  complete  system 
of  religious  idealisation  that  the  world  has  ever 
seen.  There  was  no  part  of  life  to  which  that 
system  did  not  extend,  no  human  emotion  which  it 
had  not  made  its  own — for  good  or  for  ill.  Not 
only  by  its  own  supreme  emotional  quality  had  it 
seized  and  retained  the  emotions,  but  by  means  of 
its  transcendental  values  it  had  enormously  increased 
their  momentum  in  certain  directions.  The  three 
fundamental  theological  virtues  had  dilated  the 
psychological  capacity  of  man  to  an  extent  that 
would  have  seemed  impossible  to  a  pre-Christian 
thinker.  Infinite  Truth  as  the  possession  of  Faith, 
infinite  bliss  as  the  object  of  Hope,  infinite  love  as 
the  reward  of  Charity — such  and  no  less  formed 
the  inalienable  birthright  of  every  member  of  the 
Catholic  Church.  We  are  not  concerned  here  with 
theology  or  philosophy,  and  we  may  therefore  note 
without  further  comment  that,  as  a  matter  of  fact, 
whatever  its  explanation,  the  prestige  of  that  august 
conception  of  human  destiny  had  become,  in  the 
opening  years  of  the  nineteenth  century,  very  dim. 
Voltaire  was  not  a  final  solvent  of  the  claims  of 
ecclesiastical  authority,  but,  for  the  moment,  he 
was  an  exceedingly  effective  one.  Disillusion 
necessarily  ensued,  and  it  reached  a  depth  of 
which  the  height  of  Christian  aspiration  furnished 
the  measure. 


38         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

It  is  true  that  Merimee  did  not  himself  suffer  the 
personal  disillusion  of  the  loss  of  belief.  But 
generations  of  Christian  heredity  were  behind  him, 
and  there  is  no  doubt  that  the  close  reserve  and 
impassivity  of  manner  that  made  him  resemble  '  un 
Anglais,  sauf  le  sourire,'  says  Taine,  were  the  mask 
of  a  profoundly  sensitive  and  emotional  nature. 
His  voluminous  correspondence  with  his  'amies' 
reveals,  as  we  shall  see,  an  affectionate  and  tender 
temperament  at  which  he  himself  was  the  first  to 
mock. 

Born  into  that  clear  dry  air  of  rationalism,  in 
which  propositions  crackle  defiantly  like  pistol 
shots,  his  nature  lacked  the  environment  necessary 
for  emotional  expansion.  So  his  view  of  life  came 
to  be  based  on  a  mistrust  of  emotional  values,  and 
also,  it  must  be  added,  of  those  intellectual  general- 
isations which  many  of  them  seem  to  imply.  It 
must  further  be  noted  that  Merimee  did  not 
replace  any  of  the  lost  illusions.  He  was  not  of 
those  who  believe  the  more  ardently  in  humanity 
when  they  have  lost  their  faith  in  God,  who  find 
their  ideal  on  earth  when  Heaven  has  melted  away. 
No ;  he  lived  contentedly,  stoically  at  least,  on  the 
fine  edge  of  complete  disillusion  : — 

Veut-on  savoir  sa  conception  de  la  vie?  II  1'enfermait 
dans  une  farce  profonde  qu'il  a  re"p6t6e  plusieurs  fois  dans 
ses  lettres.  '  Arlequin  tombait  du  cinquieme  etage. 


PROSPER   MERIMEE  39 

Comme  il  passait  a  la  hauteur  du  troisieme,  on  lui  demanda 
comment  il  se  trouvait.'  '  Tres-bien,  pourvu  que  cela 
dure.'  La  vie  est  une  chute.  D'ou  tombons-nous  et  ou 
tombons-nous?  On  ne  sait.  Dans  une  seconde  nous 
aurons  les  reins  cassis,  mais  on  est  si  bien  en  1'air ! 

Complete  detachment  from  any  dogmatic  belief 
— nay,  the  passionate  rejection  of  any  such  mental 
bonds — has  not  infrequently  been  allied  with  a 
highly  sensitive  religious  temperament.  Amiel  is 
a  case  in  point ;  he  is,  in  fact,  the  prototype  of  such 
souls.  Me'rime'e  was,  it  must  be  owned,  openly 
irreligious — '  impie,'  as  the  French  say.  Beyle, 
who  delighted  in  being  called  the  '  personal  enemy 
of  Providence/  had  cultivated  with  complete  success 
the  elements  of  irreligion  which  his  disciple  had 
learnt,  in  the  first  instance,  at  his  mother's  knee. 
His  philosophy  was  the  pure  materialism  of  Holbach 
and  Helvetius ;  there  were  no  half-tones,  the  set- 
ting sun  had  left  no  twilight  behind.  As  the  years 
and  he  grew  grey  together,  he  came,  in  a  measure, 
to  modify  his  attitude,  although  the  fact  that  he 
did  so  was  unknown,  save  to  one,  until  the  year 
1897,  when  Une  Correspondance  Ine'dite  was  pub- 
lished in  the  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes. 

His  correspondent  in  this  series  of  letters  was  a 
deeply  religious  woman,  and  Me'rime'e  was  much 
attached  to  her.  Her  friendship  brought  out  a  side 
of  his  nature,  little  suspected  by  the  librarian 


40          SIX   MASTERS   IN  DISILLUSION 

Panizzi  and  Mile.  Jenny  Dacquin,  the  recipient  of 
the  first  Lettres  d  une  Inconnue.  In  these  pages 
we  have  a  Merim^e  who  has  made  a  careful  study 
of  the  Gospels,  who  regrets  his  conscientious 
inability  to  accept  Christianity,  who  can  reach  the 
point  of  saying  :  '  Dieu  me  semble  tres  probable,  et 
le  commencement  de  1'Iivangile  de  Saint  Jean  n'a 
rien  qui  me  r6pugne. '  But,  so  far  as  we  know,  except 
for  the  clause  in  his  will  directing  prayers  to  be 
said  at  his  grave  by  a  Protestant  minister,  which 
looks  suspiciously  like  a  last  stroke  aimed  at  the 
religion  of  his  country,  or  may  have  been  perhaps 
a  courteous  concession  to  the  feelings  of  the  two 
devoted  English  ladies  who  nursed  him  on  his 
deathbed,  these  velltitts  of  belief  never  reached 
the  consistency  of  a  permanent  mood  or  translated 
themselves  into  action. 

Merimee's  literary  contribution  at  first  sight 
seems  rather  the  product  of  the  leisure  of  an 
accomplished  man  of  the  world  than  that  of  a  pro- 
fessional man  of  letters.  An  accomplished  man  of 
the  world  he  certainly  was,  wearing  his  immense 
learning  with  unobtrusive  grace,  willing  to  devote 
his  time  and  erudition  to  making  a  success  of 
country-house  theatricals,  devoted  to  little  girls  and 
cats,  between  which  branches  of  the  animal  kingdom 
he  maintained  the  existence  of  a  mysterious  affinity, 
a  delightful  companion,  attractive  as  it  would  seem 


PROSPER  M£RIM£E  41 

by  a  singular  dispensation,  to  men  and  women  and 
children  alike — he  was  all  this,  but  he  was  more 
also.  He  possessed  a  very  special  and  individual 
view  of  art,  which  he  was  fortunate  enough  to  be 
able  to  express  almost  perfectly.  Indeed,  his  style, 
given  his  self-imposed  limitations,  is  practically 
perfect,  the  only  possible  criticism  on  it  being  that 
the  routine  of  its  bland  impeccability  gives  at  times 
the  suggestion  of  something  inhuman.  Never  to 
make  mistakes  is  surely  to  be  more  or  less  than 
man.  And,  in  truth,  his  view  of  life  of  which  his 
style  is  so  perfect  an  equivalent — here,  if  ever,  le 
style  cest  Fhomme — was  not  that  of  one  who  is  him- 
self involved  in  its  delicious  and  absurd  complica- 
tions, its  foolish  tragedies,  its  comedies  of  tears. 
In  his  writings,  if  not  in  his  life,  he  stands  per- 
manently aloof  from  the  passions  which  he  paints 
so  perfectly.  Never  for  an  instant  is  he  betrayed  s 
into  partisanship  for  any  of  his  puppets.  Jos£ 
Lizarrabengoa  and  the  Spanish  gipsy,  Arsene 
Guillot  and  Mme.  de  Piennes,  Julie  de  Chavarny, 
Saint-Clair,  the  Abbe  Aubain,  Colomba,  Don  Juan 
de  Marana,  types  terrible,  pathetic,  humorous,  flit 
across  his  purified  vision,  which  remains  intent 
only  on  noting  the  beauty  of  their  ever-changing 
combinations  as  they  pass.  His  attitude  is  that  of 
the  eternal  spectator,  of  the  God  whom  Mephisto- 
pheles  revealed  to  Doctor  Faustus.  That  deity 


42         SIX  MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

was  no  doubt  immoral,  and,  from  the  human  point 
of  view  which  judges  deities,  so  far,  unsatisfactory. 
But  to  be  an  immoral  God  is  the  achievement  of 
the  artist 

Flaubert  has  left  behind  him  his  ideal  of  perfect 
anonymity,  of  the  entire  self-suppression  of  the 
writer  in  his  creation.  It  was  just  this  that  Merimee 
attained  so  supremely. 

Take,  for  instance,  the  following  passage  from 
that  flawless  piece  of  work,  Carmen : — 

Elle  avait  un  jupon  rouge  fort  court  qui  laissait  voir 
des  has  de  sole  blancs  avec  plus  d'un  trou,  et  des  souliers 
mignons  de  maroquin  rouge  attaches  avec  des  rubans 
couleur  de  feu.  Elle  ecartait  sa  mantille  afin  de  montrer 
ses  epaules  et  un  gros  bouquet  de  cassie  qui  sortait  de  sa 
chemise.  Elle  avait  encore  une  fleur  de  cassie  dans  le 
coin  de  la  bouche,  et  elle  s'avangait  en  se  balanc.ant  sur 
ses  hanches  comme  une  pouliche  du  haras  de  Cordoue. 
Dans  mon  pays  une  femme  en  ce  costume  aurait  oblige" 
le  monde  a  se  signer.  A  Seville  chacun  lui  adressait 
quelque  compliment  gaillard  sur  sa  tournure ;  elle  r6pon- 
dait  a  chacun,  faisant  des  yeux  en  coulisse,  le  poing  sur 
la  hanche,  effrontee  comme  une  vraie  bohemienne  qu'elle 
etait  D'abord  elle  ne  me  plut  pas,  et  je  repris  mon 
ouvrage ;  mais  elle,  suivant  1'usage  des  femmes  et  des 
chats  qui  ne  viennent  pas  quand  on  les  appelle  et  qui 
viennent  quand  on  ne  les  appelle  pas,  s'arreta  devant  moi 
et  m'adressa  la  parole  :  '  Compere,'  me  dit-elle,  a  la  fac,on 
andalouse, '  veux-tu  me  donner  ta  chaine  pour  tenir  les 
clefs  de  mon  coffre-fort  ? ' — «  C'est  pour  attacher  mon  £pin- 
glette,'  lui  repondis-je. — '  Ton  £pinglette ! '  s'6cria-t-elle  en 
riant  '  Ah,  Monsieur  fait  de  la  dentelle,  puisqu'il  a  besoin 


PROSPER   MERIMEE  43 

d'e'pingles  ! '  Tout  le  monde  qui  £tait  la  se  mit  a  rire,  et 
moi  je  me  sentais  rougir,  et  je  ne  pouvais  trouver  rien  a 
lui  re"pondre.  'Aliens,  mon  cceur,'  reprit-elle,  'fais-moi 
sept  aunes  de  dentelle  noire  pour  une  mantille,  epinglier 
de  mon  ame  ! '  et,  prenant  la  fleur  de  cassie  qu'elle  avait 
a  la  bouche,  elle  me  la  lanc.a,  d'un  mouvement  de  pouce, 
juste  entre  les  deux  yeux.  Monsieur,  cela  me  fit  reflet 
d'une  balle  qui  m'arrivait.  .  .  .  Je  ne  savais  ou  me  fourrer, 
je  demeurais  immobile  comme  une  planche.  Quand  elle 
fut  entree  dans  la  manufacture,  je  vis  la  fleur  de  cassie 
qui  etait  tombe"e  a  terre  entre  mes  pieds  ;  je  ne  sais  ce  qui 
me  prit,  mais  je  la  ramassai  sans  que  mes  camarades  s'en 
apergussent  et  je  la  mis  pr£cieusement  dans  ma  veste. 
Premiere  sottise ! 

What  splendid  objectivity  of  treatment  is  here ! 
How  grandly  the  scene  moves  towards  its  con- 
clusion— the  treasuring  of  the  flower  from  Carmen's 
wilful  red  mouth — and  how  deftly  that  conclusion 
sums  up,  in  a  gesture  of  self-committal,  the  process 
in  the  speaker's  mind,  never  described,  but  thus 
inevitably  revealed. 

Such  revelation  of  character  compressed  into  a 
trait,  fixed  in  a  passing  gesture,  struck,  as  it  were, 
once  for  all,  in  the  clear  outline  of  an  antique  medal, 
is  the  secret  of  his  power  of  narrative.  The  daily 
actions  of  human  beings  are  in  great  measure  dis- 
tressingly irrelevant ;  three  parts  of  what  we  say 
and  do  does  not  really  belong  to  us — it  is  more 
external  to  us  than  our  clothes,  being  but  the  half- 
conscious  reproduction  in  the  mirror  of  the  mind  of 


44         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

what  we  see  and  hear  around  us.    To  discern  amid 
this  baffling  whirl  of  quasi-automatic  reaction  the 

/  really  significant  'Word,'  the  authentic  movement 
of  the  conscious  soul  with  all  its  most  distant,  most 
secret  implications,  and  so  to  express  all  this  that 
it  reveal  itself  clearly,  finally,  with  that  inevitability 
of  phrase  which  is  the  only  hall-mark  of  true  literary 
expression,  is  to  be  a  great  artist.  Merimee's 
reputation  might  well  rest  on  this  scene  of  the 
meeting  of  Don  Jose  and  Carmen. 

Nothing  is  further  from  his  mind  than  any  general 
philosophy  of  life.  '  La  metaphysique  me  plait,'  he 
writes  to  a  correspondent,  '  parceque  cela  ne  finit 
jamais.'  He  is  content  with  the  concrete  episode 

\/  and  confines  himself  to  tracing  the  psychological 
connections  of  moods.  In  this  way,  however,  he 
becomes  a  philosopher,  malgrt  lui.  Into  the 
hundred  pages  of  Carmen  has  gone  the  whole  of 
Schopenhauer's  metaphysic  of  Love  and  Death. 
Arsene  Guillot  is  worth  many  learned  treatises  on 
popular  religion  and  the  psychology  of  the  courtesan. 
Very  significant  too  is  his  choice  of  subject.  He 
seems  not  to  have  been  much  interested  in  those 

V  refinements  and  complications  which  increasing 
civilisation  has  worked  into  the  woof  of  our  passions. 
In  this  respect  he  and  Mr.  Henry  James  are  at  the 
antipodes  of  art.  His  characters  are  all  quite 
simple,  or  at  least  their  complexity  does  not  go 


PROSPER   MERIMEE  45 

beyond  the  barely-veiled  cunning  of  the  savage. 
They  are  so  dominated  by  the  passion  that  leads 
them  up  to  the  dramatic  issue  of  the  story  as  to 
appear  at  times  to  be  but  embodiments  of  it.  Not 
that  they  ever  become  mere  abstract  types.  They 
are  filled  in  with  a  wealth  of  detail,  of  plausible 
circumstantiality  which  makes  them  breathe  full- 
blooded  before  us.  Their  hands  grow  hot  or  cold 
in  ours,  as  we  meet  them  at  some  tragic  parting  of 
their  ways. 

But  everywhere  and  always  they  are  puppets  at 
the  mercy  of  fate,  and  the  cords  with  which  their 
destiny  at  last  strangles  them,  are  twined  out  of 
their  own  passionate,  wilful  hearts.  Life  is  a  force 
— a  '  Force  Ennemic ' — which  sweeps  them  on  to  the  ^ 
inevitable  doom  of  human  consciousness  in  such 
conditions. 

The  tragic  simplicity  of  his  characters  is  matched 
by  the  simplicity  of  the  issues  with  which  he  prefers 
to  deal.  Just  as  they  are  among  the  least  intro- 
spective of  the  great  creations  of  fiction,  so  these 
issues  are  of  the  plainest  and  most  direct.  Love, 
jealousy,  revenge,  unchecked  by  philosophy  or 
religion,  form  the  staple  of  his  matter.  There  is 
hardly  one  of  his  tales  that  does  not  involve  more 
than  one  violent  death.  Appropriately  he  chooses 
his  mise-en-scene  among  Andalusian  gipsies,  or  in 
the  brigand-infested  maquis  of  Corsica,  or  in  wild 


46         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

Lithuanian  forests,  where  sorceresses  dwell.  The 
naive  immorality  of  his  personages  finds  thus  a 
congruous  setting.  For,  in  truth,  Merimee  paints 
pre-moral  man  before  he  had  fully  emerged  from 
the  womb  of  his  great  Mother  '  red  in  tooth  and 
claw.' 

Of  the  subsequent  process  by  which,  in  patient 
length  of  centuries,  reason  developed  with  its 
derivatives,  religion  and  civilisation,  of  the  slow, 
gradual  formation  of  other  than  purely  egotistic 
values,  he  has  little,  if  anything,  to  say :  these 
things  do  not  interest  him,  they  do  not  possess  the 
dramatic  quality  which  he  seeks.  Of  the  world  of 
inner  tragedy  of  a  Hamlet  or  a  St.  Augustine  he 
knows  nothing. 

One  of  his  most  powerful  stories,  Colomba, 
possesses  in  a  high  degree  this  sombre  beauty  of  a 
humanity  that  we  still  feel  stirring  in  the  recesses 
of  our  inherited  being. 

Colomba  is  a  Corsican  maiden  who  is  a  living 
incarnation  of  the  dominant  passion  of  her  island 
race.  The  one  duty  of  Corsicans  is  revenge. 
They  do  not  seem  to  have  reached,  at  the  begin- 
ning of  the  nineteenth  century,  that  stage  of  civil 
development  known  as  the  law  for  composition  of 
blood.  So  strict  is  their  devotion  to  duty  that  one 
wonders  how  their  bloodthirsty  stock  has  survived. 
They  have  come  to  take  a  disinterested  pleasure  in 


PROSPER  M£RIM£E  47 

the  performance  of  these  sinister  actions  for  their 
own  sake  in  virtue  of  a  well-known  law  of  social 
development.  One  Pietri  dies  an  exceptional  and 
natural  death.  His  son  exclaims  at  his  father's 
funeral :  '  Oh,  pourquoi  n'es-tu  pas  mort  de  la 
malemort  (mala  morte)?  Nous  t'aurions  venge!' 
And  one  feels  his  regret  to  be  excusable,  indeed 
inevitable. 

Colomba's  father  has  been  treacherously  mur- 
dered about  a  year  before  the  opening  of  the  story. 
She  suspects  the  hand  of  a  rival  family,  the  Barra- 
cini,  who  are,  however,  able  to  exculpate  themselves 
legally.  One  may  imagine  how  much  value  that 
has  in  Colomba's  eyes.  So  she  sets  to  work  aided 
by  two  friendly  brigands,  who  live  concealed — 
latitanti,  as  Italians  still  say  of  their  descendants 
to-day — in  the  jungle  or  maquis  that  covers  more 
than  half  the  island,  to  weave  the  web  of  evidence. 
She  discovers  a  forgery  here,  there  an  altered  date 
in  the  documents  on  which  the  Barracini  relied  to 
prove  their  innocence.  Her  case  complete,  she 
hands  over  the  sacred  charge  to  her  brother,  an 
officer  in  the  French  army.  Ors'  Anton,  however, 
has  imbibed  the  prejudices  of  civilisation  during  a 
prolonged  residence  on  the  Continent.  He  doubts 
his  sister's  evidence,  and,  in  any  case,  would  be  for 
legal  proceedings.  A  degenerate  indeed ! 

A  un  demi-mille  du  village,  apr&s  bien  des  detours, 


48         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

Colomba  s'arreta  tout-a-coup  dans  un  endroit  ou  le 
chemin  faisait  un  coude.  La  s'e"levait  une  petite  pyramide 
de  branchages,  les  uns  verts,  les  autres  desse'che's,  amon- 
cele"s  d  la  hauteur  de  trois  pieds  environ.  Du  sommet  on 
voyait  percer  I'extre'mite"  d'une  croix  de  bois  peinte  en 
noir.  Dans  plusieurs  cantons  de  la  Corse,  surtout  dans 
les  montagnes,  un  usage  extremement  ancien,  et  qui  se 
rattache  peut-etre  a  des  superstitions  du  paganisme, 
oblige  les  passants  a  jeter  une  pierre  ou  un  rameau  d'arbre, 
sur  le  lieu  ou  un  homme  a  pe"ri  de  mort  violente.  Pen- 
dant de  longues  annees,  aussi  longtemps  que  le  souvenir 
de  sa  fin  tragique  demeure  dans  la  me'moire  des  hommes, 
cette  offrande  singuliere  s'accumule  de  jour  en  jour.  On 
appelle  cela  1'amas,  le  mucchio  d'un  tel.  Colomba  s'arreta 
devant  ce  tas  de  feuillage,  et  arrachant  une  branche 
d'arbousier  1'ajouta  a  la  pyramide. 

'  Orso,'  dit-elle,  'c'est  ici  que  notre  pere  est  mort.  Prions 
pour  son  ame,  mon  frere ! '  et  elle  se  mit  a  genoux.  Orso 
1'imita  aussit6t.  En  ce  moment  la  cloche  du  village  tinta 
lentement,  car  un  homme  e"tait  mort  dans  la  nuit.  Orso 
fondit  en  larmes. 

Au  bout  de  quelques  minutes  Colomba  se  leva,  1'ceil 
sec,  mais  la  figure  animee.  Elle  fit  du  pouce  a  la  hate  le 
signe  de  croix  familier  a  ses  compatriotes  et  qui  accom- 
pagne  d'ordinaire  leurs  serments  solennels  ;  puis,  entral- 
nant  son  frere,  elle  reprit  le  chemin  du  village.  Us  ren- 
trerent  en  silence  dans  leur  maison.  Orso  monta  dans  sa 
chambre.  Un  instant  apres  Colomba  1'y  suivit,  portant 
une  petite  cassette  qu'elle  posa  sur  la  table.  Elle  1'ouvrit 
et  en  tira  une  chemise  couverte  de  larges  taches  de  sang. 

'  Voici  la  chemise  de  votre  pere,  Orso,'  et  elle  le  jeta  sur 
ses  genoux. 

'Voici  le  plomb  qui  1'a  frappe",'  et  elle  posa  sur  la 
chemise  deux  balles  oxyde"es. 

'  Orso,  mon  frere ! '  cria-t-elle  en  se  precipitant  dans  ses 


PROSPER   MERIMEE  49 

bras  et  1'etreignant  avec  force,  '  Orso !  tu  le  vengeras  ! '  et 
elle  1'embrassa  avec  une  espece  de  fureur,  baisa  les  balles 
et  la  chemise,  et  sortit  de  la  chambre,  laissant  son  frere 
comme  pe'trifie'  sur  sa  chaise. 

Colomba's  designs  are  at  last  crowned  with 
success.  After  a  meeting,  for  purposes  of  recon- 
ciliation, with  the  Barracini  (insisted  on  by  the 
preTet),  at  which  they  are  convicted  of  perjury 
and  corruption  on  the  evidence  of  a  bandit,  called 
M.  le  Cur6,  the  two  sons  of  the  Barracini  lie  in 
wait  for  Orso  and  attempt  to  assassinate  him.  He 
kills  them  both  in  self-defence.  The  twelve-year- 
old  niece  of  the  bandit,  Chilina,  carries  the  news  to 
Colomba  and  satisfies  her  of  her  brother's  safety. 

'  Les  autres ! '  demanda  Colomba  d'une  voix  rauque. 
Chillina  fit  le  signe  de  la  croix  avec  1'index  et  le  doigt  du 
milieu.  Aussitot  une  vive  rougeur  succeda,  sur  la  figure 
de  Colomba,  a  sa  paleur  mortelle.  Elle  jeta  un  regard 
ardent  sur  la  maison  des  Barracini,  et  dit  en  souriant  a 
ses  hdtes  :  '  Rentrons  prendre  le  cafeY 

That  '  Rentrons  prendre  le  cafe '  is  magnificent ! 

The  description  of  the  procession  bringing  home 
to  their  father,  the  bodies  of  the  young  Barracini  is 
like  a  piece  of  an  antique  frieze. 

Le  jour  e"tait  dej'a  fort  avance"  lorsqu'une  triste  proces- 
sion entra  dans  le  village.  On  rapportait  a  1'avocat 
Barracini  les  cadavres  de  ses  enfants,  chacun  couche"  en 
travers  d'une  mule  que  conduisait  un  paysan.  Une  foule 
de  clients  et  d'oisifs  suivait  le  lugubre  cortege.  Avec 

D 


50          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

eux  on  voyait  les  gendarmes  qui  arrivent  toujours  trop 
tard,  et  1'adjoint,  qui  levait  les  bras  au  ciel,  re"pe"tant  sans 
cesse :  '  Que  dira  M.  le  preTet  ? '  Quelques  femmes, 
entre  autres  une  nourrice  d'Orlanduccio,  s'arrachaient  les 
cheveux  et  poussaient  des  hurlements  sauvages.  Mais 
leur  douleur  bruyante  produisait  moins  d'impression  que 
le  desespoir  muet  d'un  personnage  qui  attirait  tous  les 
regards.  C'£tait  le  malheureux  pere,  qui  allait  d'un 
cadavre  a  1'autre,  soulevait  leurs  tetes,  souille'es  de  terre, 
baisait  leurs  levres  violettes,  soutenait  leurs  membres  deja 
roidis,  comme  pour  leur  eviter  les  cahots  de  la  route. 
Parfois  on  le  voyait  ouvrir  la  bouche  pour  parler,  mais  il 
n'en  sortait  pas  un  cri,  pas  une  parole.  Toujours  les  yeux 
fixe"s  sur  les  cadavres,  il  se  heurtait  contre  les  pierres, 
centre  les  arbres,  contre  tous  les  obstacles  qu'il  rencon- 
trait. 

And  with  this  we  will  take  leave  of  Colomba, 
among  the  most  sombre  and  tragic  of  Merimee's 
creations.  In  constructing  this  type  of  primitive 
humanity,  at  once  so  terrifying  and  so  beautiful,  he 
returned  to  the  primal  sources  of  Art,  for  Primus 
in  orbe  deos  fecit  timor. 

Merimee  was  more  than  a  writer  of  stories, 
though  it  is  undoubtedly  by  them  that  he  will  live. 
He  composed  several  volumes  of  history,  published 
some  admirable  archaeological  studies — the  fruits 
of  his  labours  as  Inspector  of  National  Monuments 
— and  wrote  several  plays.  He  'commenced 
author'  as  a  dramatist  with  his  Cromwell,  which 
Stendhal  praised  highly.  He  followed  this  up 
with  his  imaginary  The"dtre  de  Clara  Gazul.  This 


PROSPER   MERIMEE  51 

volume  contained  several  short  dramas,  of  which 
the  two  best  are  Les  Espagnols  en  Danemark  and 
Le  del  et  L'Enfer,  professing  on  the  title-page  to 
be  a  translation  of  the  work  of  one  Clara  Gazul, 
'la  celebre  comedienne  espagnole.'  Such  literary 
tricks  were  much  in  fashion  in  those  days.  Pro- 
bably no  one  was  deceived,  more  particularly  as 
the  frontispiece  displayed,  as  the  portrait  of  the 
supposed  authoress,  a  caricature  of  Merimee  him- 
self in  a  low  dress  by  his  friend  Etienne  Delecluze. 
Nevertheless,  the  cleverness  of  the  postiche  was 
such  that  a  Spaniard  was  reported  to  have  said  : 
'  Yes,  the  translation  is  not  bad ;  but  what  would 
you  say  if  you  knew  the  original  ? '  He  used  his 
talent  for  mystification  still  more  cleverly  in  the  La 
Guzla,  which  was  given  to  the  world  as  a  collection 
of  Dalmatian  ballads.  He  has  told  us  the  circum- 
stances in  a  preface  written  in  1840.  Local  colour 
was  the  Holy  Grail  of  the  young  Romantics.  But 
how  paint  local  colour  without  travel,  and  how 
travel  without  money  ?  Merimee  quotes  the  recipe 
which  he  gave  to  his  friend  J.-J.  Ampere  : 

Racontons  notre  voyage,  imprimons-en  le  r6cit,  et  avec 
la  somme  que  cette  publication  nous  rapportera  nous  irons 
voir  si  le  pays  ressemble  a  nos  descriptions. 

Merimee  invented  a  bard  of  the  name  of  Mag- 
lanovich,  whose  ballads  he  professed  to  translate. 


52         SIX  MASTERS  IN  DISILLUSION 

He  added  numerous  pseudo-philological  notes,  a 
pedantic  dissertation  on  Vampires  and  the  Evil 
Eye,  and  a  plausible  biography  of  the  bard.  This 
time  the  success  was  complete.  Pouchkine,  the 
Russian  poet,  was  completely  taken  in,  and  trans- 
lated several  pieces  as  curious  specimens  of  the 
Illyrian  genius.  Merimee  sums  up  the  episode  in 
a  very  characteristic  conclusion :  '  a  partir  de  ce 
jour  je  fus  degout6  de  la  couleur  locale,  en  voyant 
combien  il  est  aise  de  la  fabriquer.'  When  local 
colour  fails,  what  remains  for  the  sceptical 
Romantic  ? 

We  have  seen  how  MerimeVs  scepticism  affected 
his  art,  influencing  him  in  his  choice  of  subject, 
driving  him  back  from  the  problems  of  civilisation 
to  the  more  spontaneous  interplay  of  passion  and 
impulse  in  a  less  sophisticated  humanity,  driving 
him  outward  from  the  study  of  the  soul  to  the 
observation  of  fact.  That  collective  process  of 
reason  which  we  call  civilisation  was  a  snare  useful 
for  impressing  the  bourgeois  ;  equally  the  individual 
process  which  we  call  a  human  character  was  with- 
out intrinsic  interest,  and  derived  its  value  for  art 
from  the  casual  combinations  into  which  it  might 
enter  with  others  on  the  stage  of  time.  And  in  all 
this  he  was  a  disciple  of  Stendhal.  But  he  was  a 
disciple  with  a  difference. 

Stendhal,  in  spite  of  his  genius,  could  never  tell 


PROSPER   MERIMEE  53 

a  story,  and  his  style — he  never  revised — was  both 
clumsy  and  careless.  M£rim6e  could  not  write  a 
really  bad  sentence,  and  was  one  of  the  best 
raconteurs  that  ever  lived.  To  the  philosophy  of 
Stendhal,  which  remained  substantially  his  own, 
he  brought  a  much  more  strictly  disciplined  intelli- 
gence, and,  in  spite  of  his  deliberate  cynicism,  a 
high  degree  of  that  indefinable  quality  called  nobility 
of  heart.  The  lives  of  the  two  men,  as  well  as 
their  literary  productions,  afford  evidence  of  this. 
The  ideas  of  Stendhal,  for  instance,  in  the  matter 
of  love  were  so  well  known  that  the  authorship  of 
Casanova's  Memoirs  was  for  a  short  time  plausibly 
attributed  to  him,  and  it  may  fairly  be  doubted 
whether  he  would  have  been  in  the  least  inclined 
to  resist  the  impeachment  of  having  been  the  hero 
of  any  of  the  adventures  of  that  egregious  Venetian. 
Merimee  was  also  all  his  life  an  homme  afemmes, 
but  he  was  of  too  fine  a  make  to  find  satisfaction 
in  the  embraces  of  the  Venus  of  the  coulisse  or  the 
carrefour.  He  was  no  saint,  as  the  phrase  is  ;  but 
he  knew  that  there  are  at  least  fifty  thousand  ways 
of  enjoying  the  society  of  women,  and  he  was  cap- 
able of  pity  and  self-control. 

J'allais  etre  amoureux  (he  writes  to  an  unknown  cor- 
respondent) quand  je  suis  parti  pour  1'Espagne.  La 
personne  qui  a  cause"  mon  voyage  n'en  a  jamais  rien  su.  Si 
j'etais  rest£,j'aurais  peut-etre  fait  une  grande  sottise,  celle 


54          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

d'offrir  a  une  fern  me  digne  de  tout  le  bonheur  dont  on 
peut  jouir  sur  la  terre,  de  lui  offrir  dis-je,  en  ^change  de 
la  perte  de  toutes  ces  choses  qui  lui  6taient  cheres,  une 
tendresse  que  je  sentais  moi-meme  tres  inferieure  au 
sacrifice  qu'elle  aurait  peut-etre  fait. 

Not  all  those  who  proclaim  loudly  a  more  romantic 
view  of  the  matter  would  be  capable  of  such  gener- 
ous delicacy. 

The  more  intimate  side  of  Merimee's  nature, 
studiously  concealed  in  his  fiction,  appears  clearly 
enough  in  his  correspondence.  It  is  a  fascinating 
compound  of  tenderness  and  mistrust,  of  sensitive 
pride  at  times  overthrown  by  an  irresistible  need  of 
emotional  expansion  and  the  spontaneous  aban- 
donment of  a  deeply  affectionate  nature.  Much 
of  his  sentimental  life  is  rightly  buried  for  ever. 
The  devotional  scruples  of  his  mistress  brusquely 
cut  short  his  first  liaison.  His  second  lasted 
eighteen  years — the  average  length  of  a  French 
government,  says  M.  Filon.  This  too  came  to  an 
end,  not  on  account  of  scruples,  but  because  the 
beloved  grew  cold.  Merimee  suffered  horribly. 
'  Mes  souvenirs  meme  ne  me  restent  plus,'  he 
writes  to  a  friend.  He  puzzles  his  head  over  the 
reasons  for  his  mistress's  change.  '  Un  remords 
peut-etre,  mais  je  suis  presque  sur  qu'il  n'y  a  pas  de 
pretre  dans  1'affaire.'  Ah!  his  enemy  was  Time, 
the  one  eternal  priest  who,  sooner  or  later,  washes 


PROSPER   MERIMEE  55 

away  our  loves  and  hates,  our  sins  and  our  virtues 
alike.     He  himself  had  not  been  in  this  affair  quite 
beyond  reproach.     The  correspondence  with  Mile. 
Jenny  Dacquin  must  have  been  carried  on,  at  least 
in  part,   coincidently.     This  voluminous  sheaf  of 
letters,  published  in  1874  under  the  title  Lettres  a 
une    Inconnue,    reveals    in    Me*rimee   a   somewhat 
exigeant  but  truly  devoted  lover,  and,  in  his  corre- 
spondent, a  singularly  tiresome  mistress.      Their 
characters  were  too  much  alike  for  them  to   be 
happy.     She  was  too  much  of  a  Merim6e  en  femme. 
Both  had  the  same  fear  of  the  open  sea,  and  pre- 
ferred   hugging    the    shores    of    their   respective 
egotisms ;  and  his  shore  was  lined  with  bristling 
rocks  and  dangerous  shoals. 

1  Le  bonheur  lui  manquait,'  says  Taine.  If 
happiness  failed  him,  it  was  not  for  lack  of  those 
external  conditions  which  are  usually  held  sufficient 
to  produce  it.  He  was  rich,  popular,  successful ; 
but  happiness  is  a  subjective  quality,  and  there  was 
that  in  his  nature  which  made  him  his  own  worst 
enemy.  He  could  never  let  himself  go.  He  was 
always  more  afraid  of  error  than  anxious  for  truth. 
This  constant  fear  of  deception  led  him  perhaps 
into  the  greatest  of  all.  For,  in  life,  he  was  by  no 
means  all  that  he  might  have  been,  and,  in  Art,  his 
place,  though  certainly  of  the  highest,  is  narrow. 


56         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 


WHEN  Gibbon  delicately  pointed  his  remarks  on 
the  'immorality'  of  the  clergy  during  the  dark 
ages,  with  the  reflection  that  it  was,  after  all,  the 
virtues  rather  than  the  vices  of  that  body  which 
were  dangerous  to  society,  he  went  far  to  redeem 
himself,  by  anticipation,  from  the  charge  of  super- 
ficiality fastened  on  him  by  the  great  ecclesiastical 
advocate  of  our  day. 

At  least,  he  thereby  indicated  his  opinion  that 
so  vast  a  topic  as  the  social  effects  of  Christianity 
could  not  be  fruitfully  discussed  on  such  a  side- 
issue  as  the  moral  defects  which  priests  may 
happen  to  share  with  their  untonsured  brethren. 
And  although  this  may  appear  to-day  a  very 
obvious  commonplace,  it  represented  in  the 
eighteenth  century — the  century  of  Condorcet 
and  Voltaire — a  degree  of  philosophic  calm  on 
the  subject  which  too  many  philosophers  failed 
to  reach.  '  Les  philosophes  du  iSeme  siecle, 
trop  disposes  a  croire  que  I'homme  est  toujours 
et  partout  le  m£me,  se  figuraient  volontiers  les 


FERDINAND   FABRE  57 

ap6tres  comme  des  capucins  fripons.'  Yes,  but 
apostles  are  not  always  and  everywhere  rogues, 
and  the  implication  hardly  became  the  men  who 
were  so  anxious,  in  their  turn,  to  try  their  hands  at 
the  regeneration  of  society.  It  is  to  be  feared  that 
even  now,  in  our  cultured  midst,  prepossessions  of 
the  same  nature  as  those  which  dominated  these 
powerful  but  one-sided  thinkers  are  not  altogether 
dead.  They  still  flourish,  for  instance,  in  what 
Viscount  Morley  once  amiably  called  the  dregs 
of  the  ecclesiastical  world,  and,  for  that  matter, 
of  the  anti-ecclesiastical  world  also.  Nay,  even 
for  those  who  aim  at  the  not  so  common  virtue 
of  intellectual  integrity,  it  is  by  no  means  easy  in 
the  particular  case  to  be  sure  of  objective  vision, 
of  'seeing  the  object  as  it  really  is,'  for,  it  is 
hardly  possible  that  our  view  of  the  social  effects 
of  Christianity  should  be  unaffected  by  our  view  of 
Christianity  itself.  And  that  attitude  is  so  largely 
determined,  as  one  of  the  greatest  and  saddest  of 
human  geniuses  has  told  us,  by  reasons  of  the  heart 
of  which  the  reason  knows  nothing. 

Attempts  in  the  direction  of  such  inquiry  have 
frequently  been  made,  both  by  the  defenders 
and  the  opponents  of  Christianity.  And  in  this 
circumstance,  perhaps,  lies  the  secret  of  their 
inconclusiveness.  For  the  offices  of  judge  and 
advocate  cannot  be  confused  without  detriment 


58          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

to  the  verdict.  Reference  has  already  been  made 
to  the  bigotry  prevailing  among  the  French  anti- 
Christian  thinkers  of  the  eighteenth  century.  They 
did  but  take  their  cue  from  the  defenders  of 
orthodoxy.  In  England  too,  such  hostile  critics 
as  Collins  and  Tindal  were  hardly  more  acrimoni- 
ous and  foul-mouthed,  than  a  Christian  bishop  like 
Warburton. 

Like  modern  scientific  psychology,  which  has 
devoted  itself  to  carrying  out  the  programme 
indicated  by  Taine  in  the  memorable  words : 
'  C'est  a  Tame  que  le  science  va  se  prendre,' 
the  nineteenth-century  novel  occupied  itself  with 
a  close  scrutiny  of  the  soul  of  man,  so  close  indeed 
as  sometimes  to  forget  its  artistic  purpose,  relapsing 
now  and  again  into  the  pure  science  which  was 
the  backbone  of  its  method.  A  literature  based 
on  Taine's  programme,  and  guided  by  an  insatiable 
curiosity  to  seek  the  precise  measure  of  every 
ascertainable  aspect  of  the  contemporary  soul, 
could  not  fail,  sooner  or  later,  to  find  itself 
confronted  by  religion. 

The  way  in  which  man  worships  the  gods  is 
surely  at  least  as  important  as  the  way  in  which 
he  loves ;  and  we  know,  to  satiety,  the  value 
attributed  by  modern  masters  of  the  novel  to 
the  latter  propensity.  Apart,  moreover,  from  the 
psychology  of  the  individual,  religion  in  its  public 


FERDINAND   FABRE  59 

aspect  is  a  form  of  social  life,  and,  in  that  capacity 
also,  challenges  the  criticism  of  the  modern  novelist. 

o 

Thus  it  seems  to  have  come  about  that,  under  the 
influence  of  a  spirit  essentially  non-religious  and 
non-metaphysical,  a  spirit,  that  is,  which,  by 
hypothesis,  abstains  from  absolute  conclusions  as 
much  as  from  preconceived  ideas,  a  possible 
method  has  been  found  for  a  fruitful  criticism  of 
the  religious  phenomenon.  We  cannot  derive  any 
precise  information  about  religion  in  mid-Victorian 
England  or  the  France  of  the  Second  Empire 
from  the  most  careful  study  of  the  Book  of 
Common  Prayer  or  the  Catechism  of  the  Council 
of  Trent,  but  'le  petit  fait  bien  choisi,'  Trollope's 
vignettes  of  the  Barsetshire  clergy,  or  Fabre's 
studies  of  ecclesiastical  life  in  contemporary 
France,  can  tell  us  a  great  deal  on  the  subject. 
The  indirect  method  of  such  criticism  is  also 
largely  in  favour  of  its  results,  for  it  reduces  to  a 
minimum,  what  may  be  called  the  friction  of  the 
critic's  personality. 

'  Had  I  written  an  epic  about  clergymen,'  says 
Trollope,  '  I  would  have  taken  St.  Paul  for  my 
model;  but,  describing,  as  I  have  endeavoured  to 
do,  such  clergymen  as  I  see  around  me,  I  could 
not  venture  to  be  transcendental.'  That  is  to  say 
that  Trollope  writes  of  the  clergy  as  they  happen 
to  occur  in  the  society  in  which  he  finds  them  ;  they 


60          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

are  described  from  outside  as  social  phenomena,  not 
from  within  as  spiritual  forces.  It  were  impossible 
to  consider  the  matter  from  a  sounder  point  of  view 
for  the  purpose  in  hand. 

Now  the  Church  of  England  in  Trollope's  day 
showed  to  great  advantage  by  this  method  of 
portraiture.  Many  of  the  country  clergy  were 
men  of  good  family,  not  a  few  of  them  reaching 
a  far  higher  standard  of  education  than  was 
common  at  that  time  among  the  English  upper 
class.  They  were  also  generally  men  of  high 
moral  character ;  in  short  they  fulfilled  admirably, 
on  the  whole,  the  purposes  for  which  an  established 
Church  may  be  supposed  to  exist  in  the  idea  of  a 
broad-minded  statesman.  The  village  spires  of 
England  pointed  to  an  ideal  in  harmony  with  the 
best  actual  elements  of  the  nation's  life. 

The  Church  may  have  been,  in  Lord  Beaconsfield's 
phrase,  still  reeling  from  the  effects  of  Newman's 
secession,  but  the  shock  had  not  made  itself  felt 
much  in  the  country  cathedral  chapters,  nor  had  the 
backwash  of  the  Tractarian  movement  as  yet  settled 
itself  into  the  current  of  modern  Anglo-Catholicism. 
The  Anglicanism  of  Barchester  stood  serene  and 
strong  in  the  consciousness  of  possession,  not  only 
of  the  spiritual  values  demanded  and  appreciated 
by  the  consciences  of  the  faithful,  but  of  those 
earthly  values  also,  which,  in  their  secular  accumu- 


FERDINAND   FABRE  61 

lations,  had  fairly  come  to  represent,  as  in  fact  they 
had  originally  expressed,  the  appreciation  of  the 
faithful. 

The  Church  of  England  stood  in  those  days, 
for  a  fact ;  was  indeed  itself  a  great  representa- 
tive fact,  —  to  wit,  the  people  of  England  from 
a  religious  standpoint.  To  those  old-fashioned 
divines,  whose  blameless  lives  Trollope  paints  so 
delightfully,  religion  was  no  matter  of  idea  at 
all,  it  stood  or  fell  as  a  fact,  compact  indeed  of 
venerable  precedent  and  present  dignity  of  circum- 
stance, but  still  as  solid  and  undeniable  as  the 
fabric  of  the  cathedral  in  which  they  preached. 
As  such  they  preached  it,  and  as  such  their  hearers 
accepted  or  declined  it.  This  may  not  have  been 
a  transcendental  attitude,  but  there  was  philosophy 
in  it  too. 

Take  the  scene  of  the  bishop's  death  in  the 
opening  chapter  of  Barchester  Towers  which  is 
one  of  truly  fine  comedy,  in  Mr.  Meredith's  sense 
of  the  word.  It  is  also  an  English,  an  Anglican 
scene.  Nowhere  else  on  the  face  of  the  earth 
could  such  a  scene  have  occurred  just  like  that. 
Archdeacon  Grantley  '  certainly  did  desire  to  play 
first  fiddle  ;  he  did  desire  to  sit  in  full  lawn  sleeves 
among  the  peers  of  the  realm,'  and  he  did  desire,  if 
the  truth  must  be  out,  to  be  called  '  My  Lord '  by 
his  reverend  brethren.  Innocent  ambitions  after 


62          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

all !  And  ambitions  not  differing  in  kind  from 
those  of  all  professional  men,  as  Trollope  in  the 
same  chapter  remarks.  Very  different  was  the 
ambition  of  Hildebrand.  Here  we  may  observe 
an  authentic  note  of  the  Church  of  England  of 
that  day.  The  psychological  characteristics,  the 
faults  and  virtues  of  the  clergy  were  those  belong- 
ing not  essentially  to  a  priesthood  but  rather  to  all 
men  indifferently.  The  moral  eminence  on  which 
the  clergyman  stood — his  ordination  vows  and 
Sunday  preaching — made  a  background  against 
which  those  characteristics  were  more  clearly 
visible  than  in  the  case  of  most  men,  but  the 
qualities  themselves  were  common  to  all.  The 
fact  is  that  the  Christianity  of  Barchester  Close, 
in  spite  of  its  goodly  array  of  dean,  prebendaries, 
minor  canons  and  vicars-choral,  was,  in  accordance 
with  the  national  temper  of  mind,  emphatically 
non-sacerdotal. 

The  picture  of  the  Church  of  England  in 
Trollope's  pages  represents  that  institution  as 
reflecting  the  best  elements  of  the  nation's  life, 
its  wholesome  morality,  its  respect  for  law  and 
order,  its  love  of  justice  combined  with  a  singular 
inability  to  recognise  a  concrete  case  of  injustice 
when  sanctified  by  tradition.  It  must  be  admitted 
also  that  certain  other  elements  are  not  wanting. 
An  heroic  impenetrability  to  ideas,  a  loathing  of 


FERDINAND   FABRE  63 

change,  a  pride  of  place  and  circumstance  that  is 
not  always  according  to  reason.  But,  on  the 
whole,  it  is  a  great  picture  of  a  noble  spiritual 
fabric  which  like  our  'glorious  constitution,'  of 
which  it  is  a  part,  a  special  aspect,  points  to  no 
individual  founder,  stands  for  no  special  idea, 
but  has  come  to  be  what  it  is  through  its  own 
spontaneous  development  as  representative  of  the 
nation's  spiritual  attitude,  modified  by,  and  in 
turn  reacting  on,  the  secular  elements  of  the 
nation's  growth. 

It  is  a  far  cry  from  the  gray,  peaceful,  rook- 
haunted  towers  of  Barchester  to  the  French 
cathedral  town  of  Lormieres ;  as  far  as  from 
the  methods  and  the  point  of  view  of  Anthony 
Trollope  to  those  of  Ferdinand  Fabre.  This 
powerful  writer,  though  little  known  in  England, 
was  one  of  the  most  important  minor  novelists 
of  the  Second  Empire.  Indeed,  one  can  only 
call  him  minor  in  reference  to  his  narrow  range 
of  subject — (he  specialised  in  priests) — and  his 
relatively  small  output.  Sainte-Beuve  praised  his 
work  in  the  highest  terms.  He  just  missed  his 
fauteuil  through  the  theological  animosities  created 
by  his  novels.  Some  of  the  Immortals  voted 
against  him  because  his  writings  were  anti- 
religious,  and  some  because  they  were  too  clerical. 
Pasteur  was  among  his  opponents  on  the  former 


64         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

ground.     His  personal  views  (if  he  had  any)  were 
never  revealed  by  him  to  any  one.     There  is  a 
tale  of  an  indiscreet  journalist  who,  in  the  course 
of  interviewing  his  widow,  asked  her  point-blank 
what   her   husband's   religious   beliefs   had    been. 
He  could  get  no  answer  but  a  silent  smile.     His 
youth  at   least  was   religious.       Like    Renan,   he 
was   a   seminarist  who   discovered   before  it  was 
too  late  that  he  had  no  vocation.     And  he  cer- 
tainly retained  from   his  training,   as  did   Renan, 
a  good  deal  of  the  priest.     He  handles  problems 
of  conduct   with   professional   delicacy   of   touch, 
with  a  true  moral  sympathy,  and  yet,  from  the 
point  of  view  of  one  who  himself  stands  outside 
the  web  of  sorrow  and  passion  in  which  weaker 
ones  are  entangled.    You  feel  that  he  touches  such 
cases  tenderly,  compassionately,   like  a  physician 
of  the  soul.     His  sympathy  also  for  those  of  his 
characters  in  whom  the  ecclesiastical  type  of  virtue 
is   fully  developed,   is   clear   enough.       Not   that 
this    sympathy   ever    blurs    his   vision.       In   Les 
Courbezons,  one  of  his  most  admirably  executed 
characters,  a  miracle  of  Christian  charity  and  pure- 
hearted  devotion,   creates  misery  all  around  him 
through  his  inability  to  practise  such  elementary 
virtues  as  foresight  and  thrift     The  man's  admira- 
tion for  the  qualities  he  describes  so  well  does  not 
prevent  the  artist  seeing  through  and  beyond  them. 


FERDINAND   FABRE  65 

It  was  partly  his  inability  to  interest  himself  iri 
the  personages  of  the  modern  novel,  combined 
with  the  accidental  circumstance  of  his  ecclesi- 
astical training,  that  led  Fabre  to  his  chosen 
subject. 

1  Assurement  ces  personnages,  —  le  mari,  la 
femme  et  1'amant, — qui  deTraient  le  roman  contem- 
porain,  qui  le  deTraieront  peut-£tre  toujours,  car 
les  combinaisons  entre  ces  trois  facteurs  sont 
imperissables  comme  la  vie  elle-meme,  offraient 
un  interet  tres  vif.  Mais  comment  arrivait-il  que 
ces  combinaisons,  tantot  ingdnieuses,  tantot  puis- 
santes,  me  laissaient  froid  ?  .  .  .  Dans  1'Eglise  au 
contraire  j'£tais  saisi,  touchd  tout  de  suite.  II 
n'£tait  pas  un  detail  du  b£nitier  au  tabernacle, 
dans  la  domaine  des  choses,  du  plus  humble  des- 
servant  au  souverain  pontife,  dans  la  domaine  des 
hommes,  qui  empreint  pour  moi  de  quelque  sou- 
venir suave  ou  terrible,  ne  me  remuat  tete  et 
cceur.'  From  the  point  of  view  of  modern  litera- 
ture the  Church  means  the  Priest;  on  the  priest 
then  Fabre  concentrated  his  powers  of  observa- 
tion and  description. 

That  mysterious  figure,  the  foster-father  of 
civilisation  and,  in  turn,  its  bitterest  enemy,  is 
indeed  of  a  nature  to  interest  the  psychological 
inquirer.  A  man  and  yet  not  a  man,  for  he  is 
both  more  and  less  than  a  man,  the  Catholic  priest 

E 


66         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

is  the  true  descendant  of  all  the  medicine-men 
and  soothsayers  of  the  past,  as  he  is  the  most 
complete  and  finished  expression  of  the  idea 
which  they  all  more  or  less  successfully  incarnated. 
That  idea  briefly  comes  to  this  :  that  the  unknown 
force  of  the  universe,  the  source  of  life  from  which 
we  come  and  to  which  after  our  brief  wandering 
we  must  return,  being  animated  by  an  intelligence 
and  will  akin  to  the  human,  can  be  approached  by 
us  in  our  own  interests,  more  humano.  A  priest- 
hood exists  in  order  to  regulate  and  assure  the 
success  of  our  commerce  with  the  Divine  Un- 
known. 

Some  God  or  specially  inspired  prophet  has 
established  the  conditions  of  the  compact  between 
men  and  the  Divine,  and  priests  are  the  appointed 
channel  by  which  the  graces  of  the  covenant  are 
secured  to  us.  Outside  their  ministrations  (says 
each  priesthood  in  turn)  all  is  uncertain.  Such 
or  something  like  it,  is  the  idea  on  which  every 
priesthood  has  been  based.  In  addition  to  this 
the  Catholic  priest  has  the  perfectly  distinct  value 
of  the  Christian  moralist,  and  it  is  the  possession 
of  this  ethical  quality,  in  addition  to  the  common 
ground  of  all  priesthoods,  that  gives  its  special 
note,  we  may  add,  its  special  vigour  to  the  hier- 
archy of  the  Church.  For  those  who  are  suscep- 
tible to  the  attraction  of  a  positive  religion, 


FERDINAND   FABRE  67 

who  are  possible  clients  of  a  priesthood,  may  be 
roughly  divided  into  two  classes.  There  are 
those  who  are  most  interested  in  the  idea  under- 
lying all  priesthoods,  namely  the  notion  of  some 
certain  channel  of  communication  with  the  un- 
known. Such  as  these  will  thrill  with  atavistic 
terrors  at  the  thought  of  death ;  they  have  perhaps 
done  much  that  they  would  have  undone,  and  they 
feel  that  no  natural  force  exists  which  can  do  that 
for  them.  The  claim  of  the  Catholic  priest  to  do 
just  this — definitely,  positively  to  forgive  their  sins 
at  a  given  moment,  and  thereby  ultimately  secure 
them  from  the  terrors  of  the  grave, — is  exactly 
what  they  want.  They  do  not  feel  any  great 
interest  in  the  moral  or  spiritual  process  implied, 
still  they  wind  themselves  up  to  it  under  their 
confessor's  direction,  as  a  necessary  condition  of 
what  they  must  have.  There  are  others  who  are 
primarily  drawn  to  the  ideal  life  of  the  Church. 
Rightly  or  wrongly  they  think  that  that  life  is  the 
exclusive  possession  of  the  Catholic  religion.  To 
secure  those  elements  of  peace  and  holiness  they 
are  quite  willing  to  fulfil  the  conditions  of  member- 
ship imposed.  So  they  accept  without  much 
thought,  or  any  particular  interest  in  the  points 
involved,  the  thaumaturgic  side  of  the  system. 
Thus  the  net  of  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  takes 
fish  of  more  than  one  sort. 


68          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

If  the  Catholic  priest  were  merely  a  priest  he 
would  not  appeal  to  these  more  spiritually-minded 
clients;  if  he  were  merely  a  moralist  he  would 
have  no  power  over  the  superstitious  sin-stricken 
multitude.  As  it  is,  he  has  the  power  of  holding 
them  both.  In  order  to  do  this,  however,  he 
must  do  more  than  advance  his  claim ;  he  must 
present  himself  plausibly  in  both  his  capacities. 
To  achieve  their  combination  in  one  individual 
an  altogether  special  system  of  education  is  neces- 
sary, which  inevitably  results  in  the  formation  of 
a  very  special  and  peculiar  character.  It  is  this 
priestly  character  which  is  the  subject  of  Fabre's 
studies,  whether  he  lingers  with  the  country  curds 
in  the  Cevennes,  among  priests  of  the  Lord  who 
heal  the  physical  ailments  of  horse  and  man,  as  in 
the  Courbezons  and  Mon  Oncle  Ctlestin,  or  guides 
us  through  the  intricacies  of  the  conflict  between 
Rome  backed  by  the  religious  congregations  and 
the  remnants  of  Gallicanism  as  in  Lucifer,  or 
depicts  the  terrific  shapes  which  egotism  and  envy 
take  on  in  the  narrow  and  darkened  soul  of  an 
ambitious  cleric  as  in  L '  Abbt  Tigrane. 

It  is  a  character  which  fascinates  and  repels. 
The  narrowness  which  is  the  condition  of  its 
strength  makes  it  hard  of  comprehension  by  the 
modern  world.  This  fact  does  not  in  the  least 
disconcert  the  priest  '  Dieu  a  maudit  le  monde, 


FERDINAND   FABRE  69 

nous  n'avons  qu'un  devoir  stricte  envers  lui,  c'est 
de  le  sauver,'  says  the  Superior  of  the  Capuchins 
in  L'Abbe"  Tigrane. 

This  is  no  pulpit  rhetoric,  it  represents  the  sober 
and  permanent  conviction  of  the  ecclesiastical  con- 
science, the  true  'power  behind  the  Pope.'  It  is, 
moreover,  the  correct  deduction  from  the  prin- 
ciples on  which  that  conscience  has  been  formed. 
From  the  age  of  fourteen  the  future  priest  is 
trained  in  the  monastic  seclusion  of  the  seminary. 
That  training  is  of  course  primarily  theological ; 
but  theology  alone  will  not  fit  him  for  his  career  as 
a  fisher  of  men.  He  must  have  some  notion  of 
history,  for  history  is  a  part  of  apologetics ;  he 
must  know  some  natural  science,  for  we  live  in 
the  days  of  the  professor ;  he  must  at  least  have 
a  smattering  of  philosophy,  for  Kant  and  Hegel 
require  periodic  refutation.  None  of  these  things 
indeed  need  he  know  for  their  own  sake.  Every- 
thing must  be  done  Ad  majorem  Dei  Gloriam,  and 
the  glory  of  God  is  the  triumph  of  the  Church.  In 
the  ordinary  life  of  men  in  the  '  world/  the  ideal 
motive  is  intermittent.  It  intervenes  in  the  play 
of  passion  and  impulse  to  correct,  to  guide,  to 
modify ;  nor  is  this  state  of  things  without  justi- 
fication. Vauvenargues  says  that  we  perhaps  owe 
the  greatest  advantages  of  the  spirit  to  our 
passions,  and  that,  without  them,  man  would 


70          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

never  have  learned  the  lesson  of  reason.  Far 
otherwise  is  the  ecclesiastical  view  based  on  a 
scholastic  realism  which  considers  reason  and 
passion  not  as  psychological  products,  as  resultants 
of  the  interplay  of  consciousness  and  environment, 
as  complementary  factors,  to  be  allowed  their  full 
value  in  the  construction  of  character,  but  as 
objective  entities  really  existing  in  the  terms  of 
their  definitions  and  necessarily  at  perpetual  war. 
Hence  it  comes  about  that,  in  the  case  of  the 
priest,  the  action  of  the  ideal  motive  is  incessant, 
omnipresent,  all-devouring.  Sometimes  of  course 
a  terrific  reaction  ensues.  Sometimes  the  strings 
screwed  up  to  their  top  note  will  snap.  When 
this  happens,  when  the  priest  'falls,'  great  indeed 
is  his  fall.  He  is  unlikely  to  stop  in  his  down- 
ward course  at  the  average  moral  or  immoral  level 
of  the  mere  man  of  the  world. 

The  positive  elements  of  the  seminary  training 
are  reinforced  and  intensified  by  the  negative. 
The  young  Levite  is  kept  in  as  complete  seclusion 
as  possible  throughout  the  whole  period  of  his 
education.  The  result  is  that  he  grows  up  in 
complete  ignorance  of  the  real  life  of  men  and 
women  in  the  world.  He  has  no  conception  of  the 
existence  of  any  ethical  system  whatever  except 
the  one  in  which  he  has  been  trained.  All  those 
then  who  do  not  acknowledge  the  claims  of 


FERDINAND   FABRE  71 

that  system  are  necessarily  without  real  morality. 
Matthew  Arnold  has  told  us  in  one  of  his  most 
charming  essays,  of  the  account  of  the  religion  of 
Paganism  which  he  found  in  the  Abbe"  Migne's  Dic- 
tionnaire  des  Origines  du  Christianisme.  '  Pagan- 
ism invented  a  mob  of  divinities  with  the  most 
hateful  character,  and  attributed  to  them  the  most 
monstrous  and  abominable  crimes.  It  personified 
in  them  drunkenness,  incest,  kidnapping,  adultery, 
sensuality,  knavery,  cruelty  and  rage  .  .  .  what 
must  naturally  have  been  the  state  of  morals 
under  the  influence  of  such  a  religion,  which  pene- 
trated with  its  own  spirit  the  public  life,  the  family 
life,  and  the  individual  life  of  antiquity.'  Scarcely 
less  wide  of  the  mark  is  the  only  view  of  the 
world  around  him  possible  to  the  average  semin- 
arist. What  can  the  noblest  aspirations  of  modern 
life  be  to  him  ?  Mere  delir amenta.  What  can  he 
think  of  the  passion  of  liberty  when  he  has  been 
taught  to  believe  that  all  ethic  is  founded  on  the 
basic  virtue  of  minute  and  rigid  obedience  to 
authority?  What  he  thinks  of  the  desire  for 
justice,  so  ineradicable  an  element  of  the  modern 
conscience,  the  last  few  years  of  French  history 
have  proved  us  ad  nauseam. 

Thus  armed  with  weapons  which,  if  they  were 
adapted  for  the  purpose  in  hand,  he  would  lack  the 
strength  to  wield,  he  emerges  at  the  age  of  twenty- 


72          SIX   MASTERS   IN  DISILLUSION 

four  to  do  battle  with  a  world  which,  even  in  the 
countries  in  which  he  stands  without  serious  rivals 
as  the  representative  of  the  religious  principle, 
needs  the  stimulus  of  an  electoral  crisis  seriously 
to  advert  to  his  existence.  He  soon  finds  that 
the  sword  which  flashed  so  bravely  in  the  mimic 
warfare  of  seminary  dialectics,  snaps  in  his  hand 
like  a  stage-property  when  employed  on  the 
actualities  of  life  ;  that  men  have  grown  hopelessly 
suspicious  of 

The  old-world  cures  they  half  believe 
For  woes  they  wholly  understand. 

Then  one  of  two  things  happens.  If  he  be  a 
man  of  naturally  indolent  character  he  retires  into 
his  presbytery  as  a  snail  into  his  shell.  Those 
who  want  him  can  seek  him  out.  He  knows  that 
the  world  is  all  wrong.  '  Totus  mundus  in  maligno 
positus  est,'  says  the  Apostle,  but  he  lacks  the 
strength  and  perseverance  to  keep  on  crying  the 
melancholy  fact  into  deaf  ears  in  the  market-place. 
To  what  end  indeed  ?  No  one  listens  to  him. 
Not  for  nothing  has  he  put  off  the  'old  man'  of 
his  secular  garments  and  been  clothed  in  the 
angelica  vestis  of  the  '  new.'  He  has  lost  his  old, 
his  human  self,  and  has  put  on  the  abstract  person- 
ality of  the  Church,  and  it  is  just  that  personality 
that  the  world  will  have  none  of.  He  finds  himself 


FERDINAND   FABRE  73 

in  the  position  of  having  constantly  to  prove  his 
existence  as  a  preliminary  to  the  securing  of  a 
hearing.  And  the  position  is  an  unpleasant,  an 
intolerable  one.  So  he  gives  it  up  and  retires 
to  lay  mines  according  to  his  ability.  On  the  other 
hand,  a  man  of  really  strong  character,  whose 
virility  has  not  been  sapped  by  his  training,  is  stung 
by  his  painful  position  into  the  extreme  of  com- 
bativeness.  The  celestial  war-cry  :  Quis  ut  Deus  / 
rings  in  his  ears.  God's  victory  cannot  be  doubt- 
ful and  God's  victory  is  the  Church's  and  the 
Church's  is  his  own.  In  this  way  we  reach  the 
type  of  the  Abbe"  Tigrane. 

This  great  man  is  undoubtedly  the  most  impor- 
tant of  Fabre's  ecclesiastical  creations.  Vividly  as 
the  others  are  painted,  they  pale  before  his  fires. 
He  glows  with  the  flamboyant  colours  of  an  Hilde- 
brand  or  an  Innocent  in.,  and,  in  happier  days,  his 
career  would  doubtless  have  been  such  as  theirs. 
As  it  is  we  take  leave  of  him  an  Archbishop,  still 
in  the  prime  of  his  life,  discussing  with  his  faithful 
Vicar-General  his  chances  of  the  Cardinalate  and 
the  Papacy. 

The  Abb6  Ruffin  Capdepont,  nicknamed  by  his 
companions  in  the  seminary  Abbe  Tigrane  on 
account  of  his  irritability,  is  one  of  the  high  officials 
of  the  diocese  of  Lormieres  which  is  governed 
at  the  time  the  story  opens  by  the  aristocratic, 


74          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

generous-minded  Mgr.  de  Roquebrun.  This  pre- 
late has  also  his  weaknesses  of  temper  which  do 
not  make  easier  his  relations  with  his  Superieur 
du  Grand  Seminaire. 

Capdepont  hates  the  bishop,  who  has,  he  con- 
ceives, robbed  him  of  the  diocese  of  Lormieres. 
Nolo  Episcopari  was  never  his  motto,  and  he  had 
so  dwelt  on  the  chances  of  his  appointment  to  the 
see  that  when  Mgr.  Roquebrun  was  chosen  for  the 
mitre  he  felt  it  was  a  personal  and  unforgiveable 
insult 

'  On  ne  sait  pas  assez  chez  les  laiques  ce  qu'est 
1'episcopat  pour  un  pretre.  Hier  vous  etiez  simple 
soldat  dans  une  arm6e  de  quatre-vingt  mille 
hommes  (il  y  a  environ  quatre-vingt  mille  eccl£si- 
astiques  en  France),  aujourd'hui  vous  passez  tout 
d'un  coup  general.  La  transition  n'est  pas  plus 
menagee  que  cela.  Le  desservant,  le  cure-doyen, 
le  chanoine,  le  grand-vicaire  possedent  les  memes 
droits  canoniques  restreints ;  1'eveque  seul  possede 
le  sacerdoce  dans  sa  plenitude.  Et  puis  quelle 
situation  autre  dans  le  monde!  vous  etes  prince 
de  la  Sainte  Eglise  Romaine,  on  vous  appelle 
"  Monseigneur,"  le  pape  ne  vous  nomme  plus  que 
"  Venerable  Frere,"  s'il  veut  prononcer  une  decision 
relative  a  la  reTorme  du  dogme  ou  de  la  discipline 
il  ne  peut  le  faire  sans  vous ;  (L'Abbt  Tigrane 
was  written  before  1870)  vous  allez  a  Rome,  ad 


FERDINAND    FABRE  75 

limina  apostolorum,  comme  on  dit,  et  Ton  vous 
reQoit  au  Vatican  avec  la  haute  distinction  accorded 
aux  souverains.  Qui  sait  si  maintenant  que  vous 
avez  la  mitre  d'eVeque,  vous  n'obtiendrez  pas  plus 
tard  la  barette  de  Cardinal  ?  Qui  sait  meme  si, 
par  le  fait  des  revolutions  dont  nos  temps  ne  sont 
pas  avares,  vous  ne  coifferez  pas  un  jour  la  tiare  ? 
Urbain  iv.  n'etait-il  pas  le  fils  d'un  savetier  de 
Troye?  Jean  xxn.  n'avait-il  pas  vu  le  jour  a 
Cahors  ? ' 

It  must  not  be  supposed  that  the  Superieur  du 
Grand  Seminaire  is  represented  as  a 'bad  priest.' 
Far  from  it ;  his  morals  are  above  suspicion ;  '  Je 
fus  toujours  chaste ! '  he  exclaims  one  day,  in  a 
moment  of  expansion  to  his  confidant  1'Abbe  Mical. 
He  has  but  one  passion — ambition. 

' Zelus  domus  tuce  comedit  me!'  His  zeal  for 
the  glory  of  God's  house  has  turned  into  a  mon- 
strous, despotic  egotism.  God  must  conquer ;  who 
so  fit  to  win  the  Church's  battle  as  himself?  But, 
to  win  that  battle,  he  must  have  a  free  hand,  he 
must  have  power,  ever  more  and  more  power.  He, 
at  last,  comes  in  his  monomania  to  identify  himself 
with  his  cause,  or  rather  his  cause  with  himself. 
He  can  only  see  the  triumph  of  God  in  his  own 
exaltation.  So  he  is  led,  on  the  occasion  of  Mgr. 
de  Roquebrun's  funeral,  into  a  moment  of  real 
insanity,  when,  to  the  horror  even  of  his  own  sup- 


76         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

porters,  he  snatches  at  the  episcopal  ring  on  the 
hand  of  the  deceased  prelate,  whom  he  insults  in 
death  by  refusing  admission  to  his  body  into  his 
own  cathedral.  The  critics  took  exception  to  this 
terrible  scene  on  the  ground  of  caricature.  Fabre 
replied  that  the  Abbe  Tigrane  was  no  fictitious 
character,  and  that  he  had  not  dared  to  give  the 
real  facts  of  the  case  as  they  had  come  to  his  know- 
ledge precisely  for  fear  of  that  criticism.  The 
original  Tigrane  had  left  the  Bishop's  remains,  not 
in  the  Cathedral  square,  but  in  the  episcopal 
stables ! 

It  is  needless  to  say  that  Tigrane  aspired  to 
succeed  the  Bishop,  and  such  was  his  ability  that 
he  did  so.  His  enemies  did  not  fail  to  inform  the 
Vatican  of  his  scandalous  behaviour,  but  in  vain. 

No  one,  of  course,  supposes — Fabre  least  of  all 
— that  Tigrane  is  the  average  priest.  He  is  typical 
in  a  very  different  sense  to  that.  All  strong-minded 
men  of  action  are  inclined  to  be  ambitious,  and 
their  ambition  may,  as  likely  as  not,  assume  a 
form  which  is  profitable  to  society.  In  Tigrane  we 
see  an  extreme  instance  of  the  ravages  of  ambition 
in  the  ecclesiastical  soul.  And  precisely  that  form 
of  ambition  is  essentially  a  priestly  vice — or  virtue. 
Its  peculiar  quality  as  well  as  its  intensity  comes 
from  the  identification  by  the  priest  of  himself  with 
the  Highest,  of  his  own  egotism  with  the  transcen- 


FERDINAND   FABRE  77 

dental  egotism  of  the  Church.  It  is  in  the  fact 
that  no  one  but  he  is  in  the  position  to  make  that 
identification,  that  the  unique  quality  of  the  priest's 
ambition  consists,  while  its  peculiar  intensity  is  due 
to  the  concentration  of  his  professional  ideal  of  all 
that  energy  which,  in  the  case  of  most  men,  is  dis- 
tributed over  a  variety  of  objects,  together  with  the 
narrowness  of  outlet  which  is  the  inevitable  result 
of  his  education.  No  one  knew  better  than  Fabre 
that  all  priests  are  not  ambitious,  and,  in  his  long 
series  of  ecclesiastical  portraits,  he  has  shown  us 
not  a  few  humble  and  zealous  servants  of  humanity. 
To  them  all  honour.  But  he  has  shown  us  in 
Tigrane  a  typical  instance  of  what  clerical  ambition 
means,  and  he  also  knew  how  liable  priests  are  to 
that  particular  vice.  The  drunken  or  incontinent 
priest  is  the  victim  of  faults  common  to  all  men. 
Such  a  one  pecca  come  uomo — he  sins  as  a  man — as 
a  dignitary  once  said  to  the  present  writer :  Tigrane, 
on  the  other  hand,  may  be  said  to  sin  as  Lucifer. 

In  reading  these  criticisms  of  the  French  and 
English  Churches  one  cannot  but  be  struck  by  the 
difference  of  the  problems  presented  by  either  form 
of  Christianity.  The  anonymous  forces  which,  by 
their  more  or  less  constant  equilibrium,  have  main- 
tained the  Church  of  England  in  existence,  must 
necessarily  come  under  the  influence  of  the  Time- 
spirit.  Indeed,  it  is  obvious  that  that  spirit  is  what 


78         SIX   MASTERS   IN  DISILLUSION 

gives  the  Church  its  'form,'  as  scholastics  would 
say ;  while,  on  the  other  hand,  the  Catholic  Church 
anathematises,  in  Pius  ix.'s  Syllabus,  those  who 
would  be  rash  enough  to  maintain  '  that  the  Roman 
Pontiff  can  and  ought  to  effect  a  reconciliation  and 
compromise  with  progress,  liberalism,  and  modern 
civilisation.'  And  though  ecclesiastical  authority 
has  at  present  a  wary  course  to  steer  between  the 
achieved  results  of  secular  science  and  the  positions 
to  which  traditional  theology  stands  committed,  its 
success  is  not  by  any  means  so  uncertain  as  anti- 
clericals  like  to  think.  For  those  positions  by  no 
means  always  engage  infallibility,  and,  even  when 
they  do,  the  infallibility  of  a  decree  is  one  thing, 
and  its  interpretation  another.  Interpretation  may 
well  be  progressive.  This  is  not  the  place  to  discuss 
the  ecclesiastical  future  of  Europe,  but  I  may  be 
allowed  at  the  close  of  this  essay  to  indicate  an 
element  of  the  discussion  which  too  often  fails  to 
obtain  recognition.  The  real  life  of  the  Catholic 
Church  is  its  mystical  life.  The  Church's  politico- 
ecclesiastical  appearance  shifts  and  changes,  it  is 
the  work  of  men  not,  as  a  rule,  distinguished  above 
their  fellows  for  intelligence  or  spiritual  quality,  and 
often  conspicuously  below  them.  To  suppose  that 
the  life  of  the  Church  depends  on  anything  they 
can  say  or  do  would  be  a  grotesque  inversion  of 
things.  The  sources  of  the  Church's  life  are  not 


FERDINAND  FABRE  79 

to  be  found  in  consistories  or  any  conceivable 
priestly  conciliabule,  but  are  deep  in  the  semi- 
conscious soul  of  the  civilisation  at  whose  birth  she 
was  present  and  to  whose  development  her  assist- 
ance has,  up  till  our  day,  been  necessary.  Will 
that  assistance  be  always  necessary  ?  or,  to  vary 
the  question,  will  those  sources  ever  run  dry  ?  He 
would  be  a  rash  man  who  would  answer. 


80          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 


JORIS-KARL  HUYSMANS 

SIXTEEN  years  ago  M.  Jules  Huret,  the  well-known 
Parisian  journalist,  published  an  Enqudte  sur 
(Evolution  LitUrairc.  He  interviewed  some 
thirty  of  the  best-known  novelists  and  men  of 
letters  in  France  and  gave  their  views  to  the 
world  without  comment,  save  that  involved  in  the 
colloquial  skill  with  which  he  gracefully  delivered 
them  of  their  opinions.  And  he  thus  produced  a 
most  interesting  and  important  volume.  Apart 
from  the  literary  value  of  the  pot-pourri,  its  signifi- 
cance was  of  the  highest.  For  the  writers  inter- 
viewed— such  was  M.  Huret's  professional  ability — 
did  not  hesitate  to  express  themselves  with  in- 
genuous candour  on  their  own  prospects  and  those 
of  their  confreres. 

On  first  reading  one  derived  but  a  hopelessly 
confused  impression,  but  gradually,  as  the  cloud  of 
stormy  eloquence  rose,  one  discerned  two  things  on 
which  the  writers  interviewed  seemed  pretty  well 
agreed :  That  naturalism  was  dead,  and  that  among 
the  jeunes,  from  whom  something  new  was  to  be 


JORIS-KARL  HUYSMANS  81 

expected,  Huysmans,  Remy  de  Gourmont,  and 
Maurice  Barres  had,  in  the  vivid  vernacular  of  the 
French  writing-table,  quelque  chose  dans  le  ventre. 
Sixteen  years  have  passed,  and  Barres  has  left  the 
battles  of  letters  for  the  repose  of  the  Palais  Bourbon 
and  the  Academy,  Remy  de  Gourmont  has  produced 
several  volumes  of  philosophical  romance  of  a  high 
order,  and  continues  to  delight  us  twice  a  month  in 
the  Mercure  de  France  with  his  own  strongly  indi- 
vidualised blend  of  Nietzsche  and  Renan,  while 
Huysmans  has  left  us  for  ever  within  the  last  few 
months.  He  entered  into  peace  through  the  gate 
of  pain,  of  pain  so  intolerable  that  it  will  not  bear 
thinking  of,  but  before  the  eyes  of  that  lover  of 
exquisite  sensation  were  veiled  by  his  last  unutter- 
able anguish,  he  had  accomplished  his  task. 

Joris-Karl  Huysmans,  who  was  born  in  Paris  of 
Flemish  descent,  in  1848,  commenced  author  as  a 
fervent  disciple  of  Zola.  He  was  one  of  the  con- 
tributors to  the  famous  Soire'es  de  Medan  with 
Sac-a-dos,  a  masterpiece  of  ferocious  irony,  in  which 
the  real  distress  of  the  patriotic  conscript  is  not 
caused  by  the  heroic  sufferings  of  war,  but  by  an 
unintermittent  colic.  The  satire  of  the  little  tale  is 
Rabelaisian  both  in  its  intensity  and  the  coarseness 
of  its  detail,  and  its  essential  irony  is  enhanced  by 
its  humbling  and  brutal  verisimilitude.  We  cannot 
doubt,  as  we  lay  it  down,  that  this,  or  something 

F 


82          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

like  it  is,  in  fact,  what  war  means  to  most  of  the 
obscure  thousands  who  are  sacrificed  to  its  lurid 
prestige  and  dubious  benefits.  I  do  not  know 
whether  anarchists  make  use  of  Sac-a-dos  for  their 
propaganda ;  they  certainly  could  not  do  better. 
Les  S&urs  Vatard,  published  in  1879,  and  dedi- 
cated to  Zola  by  '  his  fervent  admirer  and  devoted 
Friend,'  is,  however,  the  greatest  work  produced 
by  Huysmans,  during  what  is  called  his  naturalist 
period.  It  is  indeed  one  of  the  finest  works  pro- 
duced by  any  of  the  writers  of  that  school,  and  far 
more  faithful  to  the  naturalist  formula  than  Zola's 
epic  poems  in  prose.  Huysmans  understood 
naturalism  in  the  sense  of  Flaubert,  who,  in  spite 
of  the  romantic  beauty  of  his  expression,  revealed 
himself  as  the  first  and  greatest  of  the  naturalists 
in  Mme.  B ovary.  Huysmans  indeed  renounced, 
whether  unconsciously,  or  through  deliberate  reflec- 
tion, Flaubert's  search  for  beauty  of  expression, 
seeking  nothing  but  accuracy  and  fulness  of  pre- 
sentation. This  he  achieves  by  means  of  an 
amazing  accumulation  of  physical  detail,  which 
produces  on  the  imagination  almost  the  effect  of  an 
actual  experience.  There  is  a  description  of  a 
Fair  in  Les  Sceurs  Vatard,  which  is  one  of  the  most 
astonishing  pieces  of  realistic  writing  ever  com- 
posed. As  you  read  it  the  book  fades  before  your 
eyes :  you  are  there,  at  Vincennes,  you  are  burnt 


JORIS-KARL  HUYSMANS  83 

by  the  sun,  you  are  deafened  by  the  shouts  of 
cheap-jacks,  you  eagerly  elbow  your  way  through 
the  steaming,  struggling  crowd  to  contemplate  the 
charms  of  the  femme  colosse  and  the  sinister  arts  of 
the  serpent-charmer ;  you  are  alternately  touched 
and  mortified  by  the  sentimental  gaucheries  of 
Desiree  Vatard,  who  clings  after  the  manner  of 
her  class  to  your  arm,  and  when  you  lay  the  book 
down,  you  feel  the  physical  and  mental  fatigue 
inseparable  from  such  a  way  of  passing  the  after- 
noon. In  this  book  Huysmans  succeeds  in  trans- 
ferring, by  suggestion,  sensorial  impressions  to  the 
imagination  directly,  with  all  the  acute  crudeness 
of  sheer  physical  contact.  But  this  is  not  all.  The 
psychology  of  De"sir6e  and  Celine  Vatard,  the  wise 
and  the  foolish  virgin,  is  presented  carefully  and 
convincingly.  Two  years  out  of  the  lives  of  two 
little  Parisian  work-girls,  one  of  whom  is  tempera- 
mentally chaste  and  the  other  the  reverse,  but  both 
of  them  bonnes  filles,  Celine  the  noceuse,  with  a 
highly  comical  sense  of  her  own  dignity  and  her 
soul  of  a  poor  little  animal  which,  after  all,  asks 
only  to  gratify  its  instincts ;  Desiree,  the  virtuous, 
with  all  the  elements  of  ihejeune  fille  of  bourgeois 
romance,  saved  from  her  sister's  troubles  by  a 
natural  modesty  of  blood,  as  primary  and  ineluct- 
able a  necessity  of  her  being,  as  Celine's  riotous 
desires  are  of  hers — this  is  all  the  story.  And  yet 


84          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

on  this  narrow  scene,  within  these  sordid  and  trivial 
limits,  the  whole  of  life  seems  to  pass  before  us. 
The  ambitious  generalisation,  the  pseudo-scientific 
theorising  of  Zola,  is  wholly  absent  from  the  pages. 
Every  character  in  the  pitiful  little  play  from  the 
leading  ladies  to  the  merest  super,  to  the  strangers 
one  brushes  in  the  street,  is  individualised,  is  given 
his  full  value  as  a  human  unique,  every  episode  is 
made  wholly  concrete,  the  author  not  only  never 
once  betrays  any  desire  to  explain  things,  but  does 
not  even  suggest  the  faintest  personal  interest  in 
his  puppets.  He  is  wholly  absent  from  his  crea- 
tion, his  pen  seeming  to  react  mechanically  to  the 
stimulus  of  the  spectacle.  Flaubert's  ideal  of  the 
impersonality  of  the  artist  is  attained,  and  the 
effect  is  the  most  poignant  imaginable.  Just  so, 
we  feel,  would  life  appear  to  us  if  we  saw  it  as 
it  really  is,  apart  from  the  deforming  mirage  of 
our  egoistic  passions.  Just  so  would  it  appear,  we 
think,  to  some  superhuman  intelligence,  some  angel 
or  demi-urge  who,  freed  from  the  limitations  and 
exigencies  of  sense  perception,  would  be  equally 
emancipated  from  those  torturing  and  delicious 
derivatives  of  the  senses,  the  imagination  and  the 
emotions.  But,  after  all,  such  a  fantastic  hypo- 
thesis is  unnecessary,  it  is  just  so  that  it  appears  to 
the  purified  eye  of  the  scientific  observer  'from 
hope  and  fear  set  free.' 


JORIS-KARL  HUYSMANS  85 

Equally  galling  to  the  vital  instinct  and  satis- 
factory to  the  instinct  of  knowledge  is  A  Vau 
FEau.  It  is  a  short  story  of  some  fifteen  thousand 
words  which  details  the  miseries  of  a  vieux  cdliba- 
taire  in  Paris.  M.  Folantin  is  a  Government 
employ 4 at  ^60  a  year;  he  is  timid  in  temperament, 
moderate  in  desires,  but  he  possesses  a  plain,  strong 
intelligence  which  precludes  the  possibility  of 
contentment  with  the  few  poor  illusions  which  his 
pittance  can  buy.  Once  more,  in  this  dreary  little 
tale,  we  are  made  to  drink  the  bitter  lees  of 
existence.  The  essential  bitterness  of  the  draught 
is  caused  by  the  absolute  futility  of  such  lives  as 
M.  Folantin's.  And  millions  of  such  lives  are 
necessitated  by  the  conditions  of  humanity.  It  is 
not  merely  that  all  super  -  terrestrial  hope,  all 
religious  and  metaphysical  aspiration  are  banished 
from  such  lives — this  if  we  accept  science  as  our 
only  reliable  guide,  we  must  be  prepared  for — it  is 
that  such  lives  themselves  are  hopelessly  mutilated. 
It  is,  however,  in  the  conviction  of  the  nothingness, 
the  ntant  of  life,  that  Huysmans  finds  the  real 
tragedy  of  humanity.  It  is  not  merely  that  men 
suffer — the  highest  hope  that  ever  irradiated  man's 
heart  was  based  on  the  joyous  acceptance  of 
suffering — it  is  that  neither  suffering  nor  joy  really 
matter.  The  universe  goes  on  its  senseless  way  to 
its  purposeless  end  that  is  no  conclusion — for  it 


86          SIX  MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

never  ends,  or  rather  it  ends  but  to  re-commence — . 
blindly  throwing  up  from  the  depths  of  the  uncon- 
scious, millions  of  conscious  organisms,  stamped  as, 
under  the  old  regime,  French  criminals  were 
branded  with  a  red-hot  fleur  de  lys,  with  the  ironic 
insignia  of  an  illusory  royalty.  Man  waves  his 
stage  sceptre  with  an  inalienable  sense  of  freedom 
and  power,  and  what  happens  ?  That  which  was 
irrevocably  determined  to  happen  when  our  solar 
system  was  still  but  a  nebula,  but  a  faintly  luminous 
corona  in  the  ether.  And  the  irony  of  the  situation 
is  raised  to  its  highest,  most  sinister  point  when  we 
reflect  that  man's  illusion  is  as  surely  determined  as 
his  impotence.  For  what  is  '  man's  place  in  the 
universe '  ?  For  a  few  seconds  the  world  reaches 
the  point  of  self-consciousness,  and  mirrors  itself  in 
the  passive  contemplation  of  a  human  mind  before 
sinking  again  into  the  unconscious  eternity  on  the 
surface  of  which  organic  life  itself  is  but  a  ripple. 
Those  minds  are  re-duplicated  a  millionfold,  yet 
each  subsists  but  for  a  few  moments  while,  sooner 
or  later,  the  conditions  of  the  planet  will  no  longer 
permit  the  existence  of  any  at  all. 

As  the  conditions  of  life  burn  lower  the  universe 
will  slowly  turn  from  the  enigmatic  and  redoubtable 
experiment  of  self-consciousness,  and  the  peace  of 
death  will  brood  once  more  over  unconscious 
matter.  Such  is  the  world  as  known  to  naturalism, 


JORIS-KARL   HUYSMANS  87 

and  the  contemplation  of  it  as  the  only  certitude 
bred  in  Huysmans  a  dull  despair.  He  exhaled  his 
hatred  of  life  in  that  strange  fantasy  A  Rebours. 
Life  is  worthless  indeed,  but,  for  the  privileged 
few,  there  is  art.  Let  us  then  abandon  life  and 
live  in  an  aristocratic  dream  of  beauty,  of  beauty 
created  by  our  own  brains  and  hands,  for  the  so- 
called  beauty  of  nature  is  a  delusion.  The  beauty 
of  nature  lends  directly  or  indirectly  to  the  strength- 
ening and  enhancing  of  the  vital  instinct,  and 
therefore  to  the  perpetuation  of  the  iniquity  of  life. 
Nature's  appeal  is  so  obviously  in  most  cases  to 
the  nerves  rather  than  to  the  brain,  hence  the 
success  of  the  uneducated.  Popular  '  art '  follows 
also  the  line  of  least  resistance,  there  must  be 
something  wrong  even  about  Rembrandt,  for  such 
hopeless  people  admire  him.  He  might  have 
added  that  moonlight  cannot  really  be  beautiful 
because  it  makes  nurse-maids  sentimental. 

The  further  art  can  go  from  nature  the  better. 
The  artistic  sensations  that  Huysmans  preferred 
were  subtle,  rare  and  complex.  The  Art  that  is 
simple  and  majestic,  the  Art,  for  instance,  that  was 
the  product  of  the  Greek  mind,  says  nothing  to 
him.  The  neurotic  hero,  Des  Esseintes,  who  has 
retired  to  the  hermitage  of  his  villa  to  live  a  life  of 
delicate  inversion,  spends  an  hour  or  two  dreaming 
over  his  favourite  books.  His  'Index*  is  signifi- 


88          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

cant.  Virgil  is  '  L'un  des  plus  terribles  cuistres, 
Tun  des  plus  sinistres  raseurs  que  1'antiquite  ait 
jamais  produits.'  Horace  '  a  des  graces  ele- 
phantines.'  Ovid  and  Tacitus  bore  him  less  than 
other  classical  writers,  but  he  is  really  at  his  ease 
only  with  the  Decadents.  Lucan  and  Petronius 
ravish  him,  particularly  Petronius  in  his  Satyricon. 
At  the  end  of  the  book  Des  Esseintes  feels  the 
reminiscent  sting  of  his  early  religious  training  and 
cries  aloud  for  Faith.  The  book  closes  with  his 
prayer :  '  Seigneur,  prenez  pitie  du  chre"tien  qui 
doute,  de  1'incredule  qui  voudrait  croire,  du  forQat 
de  la  vie  qui  s'embarque  seul,  dans  la  nuit  sous  un 
firmament  que  n'6clairent  plus  les  consolants  fanaux 
du  vieil  espoir  ! '  This  monograph  on  aesthetic 
neurasthenia,  as  it  might  be  called,  contains  some 
of  the  finest  passages  Huysmans  ever  wrote. 
Take  the  marvellous  description  of  Gustave  Mo- 
reau's  I* Apparition  or  Des  Esseintes'  terrific  vision 
of  Scrofula,  the  secular  scourge  of  human  genera- 
tions. Never  have  words  been  made  to  do  so 
much.  A  Rebours,  opening  with  Des  Esseintes' 
rejection  of  life,  and  ending  with  his  hysterical  cry 
for  Faith,  is  the  bridge  connecting  Huysmans' 
first  and  second  period ;  his  naturalism  and  his 
mysticism.  Yet  this  criticism,  in  order  not  to  be 
misleading,  must  be  made  more  precise.  In 
method  Huysmans  remained  an  impenitent  natural- 


JORIS-KARL   HUYSMANS  89 

ist  to  the  end.  Whether  he  is  writing  of  M. 
Folantin's  despairing  hunt  for  a  decent  meal  in  the 
restaurants  of  his  quartier,  or  of  the  visions  of  St. 
Lidwina  of  Schiedam,  his  methods  are  always  the 
same.  He  proceeds  invariably  by  the  accumulation 
of  physical  details  which  build  up,  as  it  were,  cell 
by  cell,  the  organic  whole  of  the  scene  he  is 
evoking.  The  intensity  of  the  evocation,  when 
complete,  is  due  to  the  power  with  which  the 
details  are  made  to  live  in  themselves,  and  the  skill 
with  which  they  are  inter-related.  He  produces  a 
composition  which  lives  in  the  apparently  spon- 
taneous unity  of  a  concrete  moment.  For — and  in 
an  attempt  to  appreciate  Huysmans,  the  point  can- 
not be  too  strongly  made, — he  is  always  concerned 
with  the  concrete  episode,  which  is  indeed  what 
gives  him  his  place  among  the  purest  and  greatest 
of  naturalistic  Masters,  affiliating  him  also,  in  no 
uncertain  way,  to  those  other  great  naturalist 
artists,  the  painters  of  his  native  land.  The 
technique  of  his  imaginative  perception  is  very 
closely  reminiscent  of  the  methods  of  the  Flemish 
painters.  The  exquisite  conscientiousness  with 
which  his  details  are  finished,  his  sense  of  colour,  a 
certain  rich  simplicity  of  order  in  his  composition, 
the  constant  recurrence  of  certain  elements — meals 
almost  taking  the  place  in  his  pages  of  the  white 
horse  with  his  red-coated  rider  in  the  pictures  of 


90          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

Wouvermans — his  sense  for  the  sordid,  the  trivial, 
are  characteristics  which  surely  indicate  the  artistic 
family  to  which  he  belongs. 

In  discourse  he  is  at  his  worst.  The  theological 
and  archaeological  disquisitions  which  seem  to  be 
interpolated,  as  indeed  they  are,  in  his  later  works, 
have  a  merely  informational  value  and  that,  I  fancy, 
not  always  of  the  soundest.  Certainly  his  theology 
sounds  peculiar  at  times.  Nor  does  their  weakness 
come  from  the  inherent  difficulty  in  taking  up  a 
new  subject  in  middle  age :  it  comes  from  his 
innate  incapacity  to  express  himself  in  the  way  of 
discourse.  His  attempts  at  reasoning  in  Les  Foules 
de  Lourdes,  one  of  his  latest  works  in  which  he 
hotly  defends  the  miraculous  nature  of  that  success- 
ful watering-place,  are  those  of  a  clever  child  who 
constantly  misses  the  point  through  his  inability  to 
resist  distractions.  You  feel  too  that  he  is  aware 
of  his  unconvincingness,  and  being  unable,  from  the 
nature  of  the  case,  to  use  his  own  methods,  turns 
in  vain  to  bitterness  and  even,  on  occasion,  to 
personal  abuse  of  those  so  unfortunate  as  not  to 
share  his  prepossessions,  in  order,  as  they  say,  to 
help  himself  out.  The  same  tendency  is  visible  in 
the  didactic  parts  of  En  Route. 

We  have  seen  that  there  is  no  difference  in 
Huysmans'  earlier  and  later  methods,  that  his 
change  was  not  in  manner  but  in  content.  In  the 


JORIS-KARL   HUYSMANS  91 

first  pages  of  La-Bas,  the  volume  which  follows  A 
Rebours  and  precedes  En  Route.,  there  occurs  a 
dialogue  which  throws  a  light  on  his  new  departure. 
After  Des  Hermies  has  said  that  naturalism  was 
the  incarnation  of  materialism  in  literature,  the 
glorification  of  democracy  in  art,  so  correct  a 
representation  of  bourgeois  ideas,  '  qu'il  semble  une 
parole,  issue  de  1'accouplement  de  Lisa,  la  char- 
cutiere  du  Ventre  de  Paris  et  de  Homais,'  Durtal 
replies :  '  Le  materialisme  me  repugne  tout  autant 
qu'a  toi,  mais  ce  n'est  pas  une  raison  pour  nier  les 
inoubliables  services  que  les  naturalistes  ont  rendus 
a  1'art,  car,  enfin,  ce  sont  eux  qui  nous  ont 
de"barass£s  des  inhumains  fantoches  du  romantisme 
et  qui  ont  extrait  la  litterature  d'une  idealisme  de 
ganache  et  d'une  inanition  de  vieille  fille  exaltee 
par  le  celibat !  En  somme,  apres  Balzac,  ils  ont 
cr£6  des  etres  visibles  et  palpables  et  ils  les  ont 
mis  en  accord  avec  leurs  alentours,  ils  ont  aid6  au 
deVeloppement  de  la  langue  commencee  par  les 
romantiques ;  ils  ont  connu  le  veritable  rire  et  ont 
parfois  meme  le  don  des  larmes,  enfin,  ils  n'ont  pas 
toujours  et£  souleves  par  ce  fanatisme  de  bassesse 
dont  tu  paries/ 

Des  Hermies  leaves  and  Durtal  continues  his 
soliloquy,  summing  up  his  conclusions  as  follows  : — 
'  II  faudrait  garder  la  veracit£  du  document,  la 
precision  du  detail,  la  langue  etoffee  et  nerveuse  du 


92          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

re"alisme,  mais  il  faudrait  aussi  se  faire  puisatier 
d'ame  et  ne  pas  vouloir  expliquer  le  mystere  par 
les  maladies  des  sens ;  le  roman,  si  cela  se  pouvait, 
devrait  se  deviser  de  lui-meme  en  deux  parts, 
neanmoins  soudees  ou  plutot  confondues,  comme 
elles  le  sont  dans  la  vie,  celle  de  Tame,  celle  du 
corps,  et  s'occuper  de  leurs  reactifs,  de  leurs 
conflits,  de  leur  entente.  II  faudrait,  en  un  mot, 
suivre  la  grande  voie  si  profondement  creuse"e  par 
Zola,  mais  il  serait  ndcessaire  aussi  de  tracer  en 
1'air  un  chemin  parallele,  une  autre  route,  d'atteindre 
les  en  de$a  et  les  apres,  de  faire,  en  un  mot,  un 
naturalisme  spiritualiste ;  ce  serait  autrement  fier, 
autrement  complet,  autrement  fort ! ' 

Such  is  the  artistic  programme  which  Huysmans 
attempted  to  carry  out  in  his  later  period.  As  I 
have  said,  he  in  no  way  wished  to  modify  the 
methods  of  his  technique  which  remained  essentially 
naturalist ;  he  wished  to  enlarge  the  content  of  his 
art,  to  widen  the  field  of  his  observation.  When 
he  speaks  of  tracing  in  the  air  a  parallel  line  to 
Zola's  line  of  physical  observation  he  makes  indeed 
a  philosophical  advance  on  his  former  position,  for 
sound  philosophy  recognises  that  experience  needs 
for  its  constitution  a  subject  as  well  as  an  object, 
from  which  it  follows  that  a  state  of  mind  as  such, 
independently  of  its  physical  accompaniment,  is  as 
truly  a  fact  as  a  state  of  body.  This  step  was  no 


JORIS-KARL   HUYSMANS  93 

doubt  taken  unconsciously,  for  there  never  was  a 
mind    more    radically   incapable    of   any   kind    of 
philosophic  speculation  than  his.     It  is  nevertheless 
what  constitutes  the  human  interest  of  the  work  of 
his  later  period.     For  that  interest  certainly  cannot 
be  said  to  lie  in  his  somewhat  bizarre  presentation 
of  Christian  mythology,  which  he  happened  to  find 
ready  to  his  hand,  to  be  tortured  and  inverted  by 
the  horrible  maniacs  whom  he  shows  us  in  Ld-Bas, 
to    be   enthusiastically,    if    somewhat    uncritically, 
glorified  in  En  Route  and  his  other  distinctively 
Catholic  works.     It  lies  surely  in  the  recognition 
of    the    mystery    of   human    experience    diffused 
through  these  volumes,  together  with  the  sense  of 
pity  of  the  human  lot  and  of  the  supreme  value  of 
love.     For  these  emotions  he  found  both  adequate 
expression  and  an  adequate  stimulus,  in  the  symbols 
of  mediaeval  mysticism.     Nor  was  that  expression 
and  that  stimulus  purely  literary.    As  is  known,  the 
road  of  Damascus,  on  which  Durtal  travels  from 
La-Bas  to  L'Oblat,  was  the  path  followed  by  his 
creator.     Whether  Huysmans'  interest  in  Catholi- 
cism was  due  in  the  first  instance  to  the  exigencies 
of  his  literary  development  or  to  the  necessities  of 
his  soul  is  an  unprofitable  subject  of  inquiry.     It  is 
enough  for  the  critic  to  note  that  his  hand  grew 
subdued  to  what  he  worked  in,  and  that  the  man 
came  to  acquiesce,  with  the  full  fervour  of  intense 


94          SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

conviction,  in  the  doctrines  of  the  writer.  To 
criticise  the  personal  solution  in  which  he  at  length 
found  peace  would  be  foreign  to  the  subject  of  this 
essay,  and  obviously  of  the  nature  of  an  impertin- 
ence. Nevertheless  as  there  have  been  several, 
and  not  of  one  camp  only,  who  have  openly 
expressed  their  doubts  of  the  sincerity  of  his 
attitude,  I  cannot  refrain  from  expressing  the 
opinion  that  never  was  there  a  more  complete,  a 
more  sincere  conversion  than  that  of  Huysmans. 
None  of  the  psychological  elements  of  such  a 
change  were  wanting  to  him.  A  disgust  of 
contemporary  life  and  an  invincible  repulsion  to  its 
ideals,  together  with  an  ardent  attraction  for  the 
naive  beauty  of  the  mediaeval  soul,  for  the  whole 
domain  of  that  wondrous  '  fief  of  Art,'  as  he  calls  it, 
which  was  the  creation  of  the  mediaeval  Church — 
these  were  most  prominent  among  the  raisons  de 
cceur  which  prevailed  with  him.  The  mysterious 
crystallisation  of  these  elements  into  the  definite 
attitude  of  belief,  is  as  necessarily  beyond  criticism 
as  any  other  vital  phenomenon.  So  much  may  per- 
haps be  said  without  offence.  When,  however,  we 
turn  to  the  literary  expression  of  his  convictions,  we 
are  once  more  in  the  world  of  discourse,  we  have 
once  more  before  us  matter  for  reasoned  appreciation. 
What  cannot  fail  to  strike  any  one  at  all  familiar 
with  contemporary  Catholic  literature  is  that  Huys- 


JORIS-KARL   HUYSMANS  95 

mans'  religious  books  fall  into  a  category  of  their 
own.  The  man  submits  to  the  discipline  which  is 
to  save  his  soul,  the  writer  remains  a  free  lance. 
The  distinctive  Catholic  literature  of  our  day  is 
either  apologetic  or  written  for  purposes  of  edifica- 
tion. And  the  public  which  it  is  attempted  to  edify 
must  be  confined  entirely,  one  would  think,  to  women 
and  children.  Huysmans  certainly  did  not  try  to 
put  himself  in  line  with  this  class  of  book.  And,  as 
regards  apologetic,  it  must  be  admitted  that  so  far 
as  he  had  it  in  mind  at  all,  it  was  of  a  very  different 
kind  to  that  which  we  associate  with  the  subtle 
disquisitions  of  philosophers,  such  as  Laberthon- 
niere  and  Leroy,  or  the  quasi-socialist  propaganda 
of  the  Christian  democrats.  The  social  or  philo- 
sophical possibilities  of  present-day  religion  had 
not  the  slightest  interest  for  his  mind  which  was 
spellbound  by  the  vision  of  the  glorious  past,  le 
moyen  age  dnorme  et  ddlicat.  In  fact  he  was  a 
medievalist  before  he  was  a  Catholic.  In  La-Bas> 
while  still  far  from  any  mental  state  which  could  be 
called  faith,  he  is  a  firm  believer  in  the  super- 
natural, in  magic,  black  and  white.  He  knows  the 
names  of  many  demons  and  their  functions  in  the 
cosmic  economy.  Indeed  it  is  matter  of  reproach 
with  him  against  the  ecclesiastical  authorities,  that 
they  betray  so  languid  an  interest  in  demonology  ; 
are,  in  fact,  as  he  fears,  tainted  with  scepticism. 


96          SIX   MASTERS   IN  DISILLUSION 

Why  insist  on  trying  to  come  to  an  understanding 
with  M.  Clemenceau,  when  you  are  really  dealing 
with  Azrael  ? 

Thus  he  resuscitates  for  us  in  his  vibrant  pages 
that  old  world,  and  makes  it  live  once  more  with 
its  fantastic  hopes  and  fears,  its  heaven  and  hell,  its 
angels  and  saints  and  demons.  He  does  more. 
He  resuscitates  also  its  beauty.  The  guardians 
of  the  heavenly  city  to-day  are  often  too  much 
absorbed  in  the  immediate  exigencies  of  the  Holy 
War  to  care  for  the  beauty  of  the  streets  of 
Jerusalem.  The  service  which  Huysmans  has 
done  in  calling  attention  to  the  treasure  of  Art 
which  is  the  heritage  of  the  Catholic  Church  is  one 
which  should  make  the  members  of  that  Church  his 
debtors,  and  in  any  case,  entitles  him  to  the  gratitude 
of  all  lovers  of  the  beautiful  everywhere. 


MAETERLINCK  97 


MAETERLINCK 

AMONG  contemporary  masters  of  prose,  no  one,  I 
think,  gives  so  unique  an  impression,  no  one  ex- 
hales so  special  a  fragrance  as  Maeterlinck.  Is 
he  a  lyric  poet?  Is  he  a  dramatist?  Is  he  a 
moralist?  It  is  hard  to  say;  indeed,  he  seems 
to  be  all  of  these  by  turn,  and,  even,  on  occasion, 
at  once. 

He  has  written  many  miniature  dramas  — 
4  Shakespeare  for  Marionettes,'  he  calls  them  him- 
self— some  of  which  are  the  most  poignant  little 
pieces  imaginable,  all  drenched  with  the  tears  and 
mystery  of  things ;  fragments  of  life  itself,  we 
think,  as  we  read  or  watch  them  for  the  first  time, 
almost  catching  our  breath  at  the  naivete*  of  their 
frankness,  at  their  childlike  ingenuousness.  He 
has  signed  pages  of  criticism,  in  their  way  in- 
imitable ;  although  they  do  not  contain  much  of 
what  is  ordinarily  understood  by  the  term.  His 
essays  on  Emerson,  Ruysbroeck,  and  Novalis 
convey  no  personal  impression  whatever  of  those 
great  ones ;  they  deal  with  the  pure  idea,  and 

G 


98          SIX   MASTERS   IN  DISILLUSION 

barely  advert  to  the  human  envelope.  But  then 
the  idea  is  made  to  thrill  with  a  mystic  person- 
ality, more  intense  than  any  which  could  be 
suggested  by  the  greatest  accumulation  of  circum- 
stantial or  merely  casual  detail.  Such  work  is  at 
the  opposite  pole  of  the  critical  art  to,  say,  Mr. 
Gosse's  admirable  study  of  Coventry  Patmore. 
There,  bit  by  bit,  the  human  being  is  recon- 
structed and  presented  to  us  with  all  the  illusion 
of  a  live-eyed  portrait,  as  he  was  seen,  loved  and 
hated  by  his  contemporaries.  It  is  just  this 
suggestion  of  familiarity,  of  personal  knowledge, 
so  skilfully  conveyed  by  the  art  of  Mr.  Gosse, 
which  is  utterly  lacking  to  the  essays  of  Maeter- 
linck. From  his  point  of  view,  such  treatment 
would  be  worse  than  irrelevant :  it  would  be 
almost  indecent.  On  that  high  tableland  of  the 
spirit,  against  the  background  of  those  eternal 
snows,  the  human  gesture,  which  our  flesh  can- 
not but  love,  would  pathetically  dwindle  into  a 
grotesque  and  pitiful  pantomime. 

It  is  said  that  some  of  the  most  beautiful  effects 
of  Corot's  landscapes  were  produced  by  the 
master  at  such  a  distance  from  the  subject  he 
was  painting  that  all  detail  was  indistinguishable 
to  the  eye.  So  Maeterlinck  discerns  the  spiritual 
values  of  a  Novalis  or  a  Ruysbroeck  by  altogether 
overlooking  their  existence  in  time  and  space,  and 


MAETERLINCK  99 

concentrating  his  gaze  on  the  light  of  the  idea 
which  they  at  once  conceal  and  manifest.  For  if, 
to  the  winking  eyes  of  most  of  us,  that  light  is 
only  tolerable  by  being  broken  on  the  prism,  as  it 
were,  of  the  seer's  personality,  by  being  refracted 
through  the  daily  habit  of  his  life  and  conversa- 
tion, which  thus  reveals  to  us  as  much  of  it  as 
we  can  bear,  all  that  to  Maeterlinck  does  but  con- 
ceal what  he  is  in  search  of.  He  prefers  to  look 
straight  at  the  sun.  We,  who  are  not  eagles,  suffer 
in  the  effort  to  share  his  vision;  and  a  darkness, 
which  we  feel  would  reveal  so  much  could  we  but 
pierce  it,  is  apt  to  descend  on  our  straining  gaze. 
The  same  criticism  applies  to  the  other  essays — 
on  moral  and  spiritual  subjects — collected  in  the 
same  volume  under  the  title  of  Le  Trtsor  des 
Humbles.  Here  and  there  the  clouds  part,  and 
an  astonishingly  pure  and  lambent  ray  gladdens 
us  for  a  moment;  we  feel  we  never  knew  what 
light  was  before,  like  those  who  for  the  first  time 
see  the  Italian  sun ;  then,  once  more,  obscurity. 
One  thing,  however,  no  conscientious  student  of 
Maeterlinck  can  maintain ;  and  that  is,  that  his 
obscurity  partakes  in  ever  so  slight  a  degree  of  a 
pose,  of  a  deliberate  mystification.  Here  is  no  atti- 
tude of  indifference,  no  mask  of  intellectual  scorn, 
but  rather  the  patient  effort  of  a  most  unusual  sin- 
cerity which,  with  the  obvious  repression  of  a  fine 


100        SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

rhetorical  gift,  endeavours  to  express  exactly  what 
is  meant ;  just  that  and  nothing  more.  Such  sin- 
cerity inevitably  appears  a  little  forced  and  arti- 
ficial to  those  who  come  to  it  fresh  from  the 
comfortable  atmosphere  of  polite  human  inter- 
course. Professor  Wallace  attributes  the  difficulty 
presented  by  Hegel's  philosophy  to  a  beginner, 
to  the  contrast  which  it  offers  to  our  ordinary 
habits  of  mind.  '  Generally  speaking,  we  rest 
contented  if  we  can  get  tolerably  near  our  object, 
and  form  a  general  picture  of  it  to  set  before  our- 
selves. It  might  almost  be  said  that  we  have  never 
thought  of  such  a  thing  as  being  in  earnest,  either 
with  our  words  or  with  our  thoughts.'  Just  such  a 
contrast  exists  between  our  habitual  retailing,  for 
purposes  of  social  currency,  of  our  profoundest 
and  most  intimate  emotions,  and  Maeterlinck's 
method  of  dealing  with  them.  We  cannot  avoid 
the  prick,  that  if  we  were  purer  in  heart,  we 
should  understand  him  better. 

It  is  proposed  here  to  consider  Maeterlinck  as  a 
moralist.  That  the  preoccupation  of  morals,  of 
the  practical  art  of  life,  has  always  been  with  him, 
is  evident ;  in  his  earliest  work  it  is  not  absent, 
but  it  has  only  disengaged  itself  and  become  fully 
self-conscious  in  his  latest  writings,  in  La  Sagesse 
et  la  Destinde,  Le  Temple  Ensveli,  and  Le  Double 
Jardin ;  and  it  will  be  with  these  volumes  that 


MAETERLINCK  101 

we  shall  be  here  principally  concerned.  It  may, 
however,  be  well,  before  considering  their  con- 
tents, to  have  clearly  before  us  the  state  of  mind 
to  which  Maeterlinck  addresses  himself.  The 
condition  of  the  hearer  is  always  an  important 
part  of  the  message  he  receives ;  and  this  is 
especially  so  when  the  teacher,  as  in  the  present 
instance,  is  rather  a  master  of  suggestion  than 
of  exposition.  What  then  is  the  mental  attitude 
on  this  subject  of  his  readers,  so  numerous  and 
appreciative  that  a  new  '  Maeterlinck '  has  no 
sooner  appeared  than  it  has  flown  in  its  thousands 
over  Europe  ? 

'  Nous  sortons  de  la  grande  periode  religieuse.' 
That  great  change,  gradually  produced  during  the 
last  three  hundred  years  in  European  opinion, 
which  has  reduced  theology  from  the  position  of 
the  Queen  of  the  Sciences  to  the  rank  of  an  in- 
dividual and  private  speculation,  has  had  its  re- 
percussion in  other  departments  of  inquiry  than 
the  theological.  Indeed  it  would  not  be  hard  to 
show  that  no  branch  whatever  of  human  know- 
ledge has  remained  unaffected  by  it.  Based  itself 
in  its  origin  on  knowledge  of  a  particular  kind, 
it  has  succeeded  in  extending  its  'sphere  of  in- 
fluence' over  much  which  might  seem  foreign  to 
it.  The  discovery  of  Copernicus  was  more  than 
a  celestial  coup  d*£tat.  It  did  more  than  over- 


102        SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

throw  man's  sovereignty  of  the  heavens  ;  it  surely 
numbered  the  days  of  Theocracy  on  earth.  That 
revolution  of  humanity  on  its  own  axis  which 
has  produced  the  Arts,  the  State,  Religion  and 
Morality,  could  not  remain  unaffected  by  it.  Nor 
has  it  done  so.  Slowly  but  surely,  what  is  called 
the  scientific  spirit  has  taken  over  every  part  of 
human  experience. 

A  phrase  like  'the  scientific  spirit'  is  apt  to 
become  a  catchword.  What  precisely  do  we 
mean  by  it  ?  Well,  I  suppose  we  mean  the 
habit  of  mind  engendered  by  familiarity  with  the 
method,  even  if  not  with  the  achievements,  of 
exact  knowledge.  It  is  not  necessary,  in  order  to 
possess  it,  to  know  the  secrets  of  the  laboratory 
or  the  test  tube ;  but  we  shall  not  gain  it  if  we 
do  not  understand  the  principle  on  which  those 
secrets  are  discovered.  That  principle  is  belief 
in  the  unity  and  intelligibility  in  terms  of  related- 
ness,  of  the  whole  phenomenal  universe,  from 
which  it  results  that  a  hypothesis  has  scientific 
value,  in  proportion  to  its  success  in  co-ordinating 
the  group  of  phenomena  with  which  it  deals,  thus 
tending  towards  that  ideal  unity,  which  it  is  the 
aim  of  science  as  a  whole  to  attain.  The  meta- 
physician will  tell  us  that  this  belief  is  a  mere 
assumption ;  and  so,  in  the  terms  of  his  art,  it  is. 
But  it  is  the  assumption  which  underlies  all  possi- 


MAETERLINCK  103 

bility  of  any  knowledge  which  is  to  be  more  than 
mere  random  and,  occasionally,  happy  guess-work. 
For  science  is  no  esoteric  craft.  The  physiologist 
or  the  chemist  has  no  short  cut  to  truth ;  he  uses 
precisely  the  same  faculties  of  perception  and 
ratiocination  by  means  of  which  we  all  organise 
a  journey  from  Victoria  to  the  Gare  du  Nord. 
He  uses  them  no  doubt  with  far  greater  caution, 
with  an  infinitely  nicer  sense  of  what  is  meant  by 
evidence,  of  the  exigencies  of  demonstration,  than 
the  layman ;  but  his  instrument  of  investigation 
differs  only  in  degree  of  precision.  It  is  an  ill- 
judged  contempt  that  some  people  pour  on  popular 
science ;  if  science  were  not,  at  least  potentially, 
popular,  it  would  not  be  science  at  all.  Of  course, 
pure,  as  distinguished  from  applied,  science  does 
require  certain  special  habits  of  trained  attention 
which  are  not  at  the  command  of  all  of  us.  But 
the  most  advanced  scientific  experimentalist  has 
no  other  faculties  to  use  in  his  investigations  than 
those  which  lie  more  or  less  idle  in  the  brains  of 
all  of  us.  Once  stated,  this  is  obvious ;  but  it  is 
by  no  means  so  universally  appreciated  as  might  be 
thought.  Many  educated  people  talk  of  science  as 
if  it  were  a  special  department  of  knowledge,  or 
one  particular  way  of  knowing  things ;  whereas,  in 
truth,  the  only  real  knowledge  is  scientific  know- 
ledge. 


104        SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

Another  fallacy,  common  enough  among  the 
laity,  is  to  confuse  the  method  of  science  in  general 
with  the  results  of  any  particular  science.  Thus 
the  champions  of  intellectual  reaction  not  infre- 
quently argue  from  the  errors  which  inevitably 
attach  to  those  results,  to  the  discredit  of  the  idea 
of  science  itself.  '  How  little,  after  all,  we  know,' 
they  say,  '  and  how  unreliable  that  little  !  Science 
shifts  like  the  sand  ;  how  can  we  take  it  seriously  ?  ' 
These  critics  do  not  realise  the  distinction  between 
the  method  of  science  and  its  results  in  application. 
They  do  not  see  that  it  is  by  clinging  more  and 
more  faithfully  to  that  method,  that  the  results  are 
gradually  and  progressively  made  perfect,  that  any 
stage  of  investigation  must,  as  such,  be  defective, 
and  finally  that,  however  unreliable  and  scanty 
scientific  results  at  any  moment  may  be,  they  repre- 
sent at  that  moment  the  state  of  our  knowledge 
on  that  subject,  and  form  themselves  the  point  of 
departure  for  further  development.  No  one  knew 
better  the  defects  of  his  hypothesis  than  Darwin ; 
and  it  is  just  those  defects  that  have  been  so  fruit- 
ful in  the  further  development  of  his  science.  There 
are  many,  however,  and  they  are  a  daily  increasing 
number,  who  realise  that,  in  the  method  of  science, 
man  has  discovered  the  true  law  of  his  knowledge  ; 
and  it  is  they  who  dwell  in  the  mental  atmosphere 
of  the  scientific  spirit.  This  atmosphere  it  is, 


MAETERLINCK  105 

rather  than  the  negative  arguments  derivable  from 
any  particular  branch  of  science,  that  has  produced 
the  effect  on  theological  belief  alluded  to  above ; 
and  it  has  produced  it  largely  through  the  change 
in  the  conception  of  truth  which  it  implies.  In 
pre-scientific  days,  truth  was  any  desirable  opinion 
which  could  not  be  disproved ;  now  the  quality  of 
truth  attaching  to  a  statement  is  felt  to  be  in  exact 
ratio  to  the  evidence  producible  for  it. 

The  weakening  of  theological  belief  has  not  been 
without  its  effect  upon  morals.  In  the  theological 
period,  by  which  I  mean  the  period  during  which 
theology  was  universally  accepted  by  us  Westerns 
as  the  basis  of  human  existence  (controversy  turn- 
ing only  on  which  was  in  fact  the  true  theology), 
morality  was  heteronomous,  being  based  on  the 
will  of  God  revealed  to  man  ab  extra.  That  it 
possessed  an  intrinsic  value  was  not  denied  except 
by  a  few  mystics  ;  but  its  mode  of  presentation  was 
authoritative  or  external,  among  Protestants  and 
Catholics  alike.  It  was  held  that  the  conscience, 
rightly  directed  and  illuminated,  would  indeed 
recognise  the  moral  quality  of  the  Divine  law,  but 
that  it  would  recognise  it  as  such,  rather  than  as 
the  externalisation  of  the  immanent  law  of  its  own 
being.  Such  recognition  involved  many  non-moral 
elements,  such  as  particular  judgments  of  fact — that 
this  revelation  and  not  another  was  the  true  one 


106        SIX   MASTERS   IN  DISILLUSION 


a  philosophical  judgment  that  Monotheism, 
rather  than  Pantheism  or  Atheism,  was  the  ultimate 
truth  of  things.  In  proportion  as  the  grounds  for 
either  or  both  of  these  judgments  were  felt  to  give 
way  under  critical  analysis,  the  heteronomous 
sanction  of  morality  disappeared.  To  the  minds  of 
many  to-day,  judgments  of  either  kind  appear  not 
so  much  erroneous  as  gratuitous  and  illegitimate ; 
and  it  is  to  such,  and  such  only,  that  Maeterlinck 
addresses  himself. 

This  emancipation  of  morality  has  seemed  to 
many  a  great  and  glorious  thing ;  and  so  it  may 
be.  Nevertheless  it  cannot,  I  think,  be  denied 
that  the  transition  of  the  art  of  conduct  from  heter- 
onomy  to  autonomy  is  attended  with  some  danger 
to  the  content  of  morality — to  our  material  if  not 
to  our  formal  virtue.  Many  delicate  readjustments 
are  required,  if  the  passage  from  the  service  of  God 
to  the  service  of  man  is  to  be  effected  without  loss 
by  the  way.  The  issue  is  not  quite  fairly  put  by 
those  who  see  in  the  doctrine  of  personal  rewards 
and  punishments  the  sole  value  of  the  theological 
sanction  of  human  conduct.  It  was  more,  it  was 
other  than  merely  this.  That  sanction  amounted 
to  a  popular  and  dramatic  representation  of  the 
belief  that  Man  was,  in  fact,  the  most  important 
part  of  the  universe,  and  his  conscience  the  most 
important  part  of  Man.  It  implied  that  Man 


MAETERLINCK  107 

touched  the  deepest  reality  in  his  conscience  only  : 
the  universe  else  was  illusion.  The  triumph  of 
good  in  the  long  run  was  certain  ;  the  victory  of  evil, 
so  palpable  and  evident,  but  a  shadow  that  would 
flee  away  at  the  moment  of  dayspring,  when  the 
Sun  of  Righteousness  would  disperse  the  darkness 
and  consummate  in  the  blaze  of  absolute  justice  the 
drama  of  humanity.  The  Infinite  was  consciously 
on  the  side  of  the  human  soul  which  was  fashioned 
in  its  image. 

Now  all  this  is  changed.  '  It  is  incomparably 
more  probable  that  the  Invisible  and  the  Infinite 
intervene  at  every  moment  in  our  life  under  the 
form  of  indifferent,  enormous,  blind  elements,  which 
pass  over  and  within  us,  penetrating,  shaping  and 
animating  us,  without  suspecting  our  existence,  as 
do  water,  fire,  air  and  light.  Now  the  whole  of 
our  conscious  life,  all  this  life  which  constitutes  our 
one  certitude  and  our  one  fixed  point  in  time  and 
space,  reposes  in  the  last  resort  on  incomparable 
probabilities  of  the  same  order  ;  and  it  is  rare  that 
they  are  so  incomparable  as  these.'  In  these  words 
Maeterlinck  resumes  for  us  the  moral  sanction  of 
science.  And  yet,  as  he  adds  :  '  The  whole  of  our 
moral  organism  is  made  to  live  in  justice,  as  our 
physical  organism  is  made  to  live  in  the  atmosphere 
of  our  globe.'  Thus  a  seemingly  absolute  dilemma 
is  created,  in  which  what  ought  to  be  is  at  hopeless 


108        SIX  MASTERS  IN  DISILLUSION 

variance  with  what  is.  It  is  not  merely  that  the 
universe  is  not  what  we  wish  it  were ;  it  is,  and 
this  is  very  different,  that  it  is  not  what  we  judge  it 
ought  to  be. 

There  are  various  ways  of  meeting  this  situation. 
There  is  the  way  of  heroic  pessimism,  which  has 
found  a  noble  expression  in  the  Buddhist  rhap- 
sodies of  the  French  poet-philosopher  Jean  Lahor. 
There  is  the  attitude  of  mingled  pity  and  irony 
which  we  associate  with  the  best  work  of  Anatole 
France.  There  is  the  immoralism  of  Nietzsche, 
echoed  by  many  thoughtless  persons,  who  would 
shudder  at  the  self-discipline  which  it  involves. 
Maeterlinck  takes  none  of  these  ways.  It  must  be 
confessed  that  he  does  not  attempt  any  dogmatic 
solution,  nor  does  he  even  allude,  in  passing,  to 
those  suggested  by  others.  He  is  content  to 
observe  directly,  for  himself,  the  moral  phenomenon 
with  the  grave,  wide-eyed  gaze  of  an  inspired  child. 
In  his  two  latest  books,  the  metaphysical  preoccu- 
pations observable  in  his  earlier  work  seem  to  have 
dropped  off  him.  Life,  the  actual  tale  of  days  of 
men  and  women,  working  in  fields  and  cities,  in 
courts  and  camps,  at  home  and  abroad,  '  on  perilous 
seas  forlorn,'  has  laid  on  him  the  fascination  of  its 
touch.  It  is  in  this  actuality,  this  nearness  to 
experience,  that  his  value  consists.  He  probes 
into  the  moral  fact  as  we  find  it  in  our  common 


MAETERLINCK  109 

human  nature,  unconcerned  with  its  metaphysical 
justification,  and  frankly  admitting  that  our  present 
knowledge  does  not  enable  us  demonstrably  to 
relate  it  to  the  rest  of  the  Cosmos.  Let  us  glance 
at  his  method  of  treating  Justice,  at  once  the  first 
and  the  last  of  moral  problems  : — 

I  speak  for  those  who  do  not  believe  in  the  existence 
of  a  Judge,  unique,  all-powerful  and  infallible,  who,  bend- 
ing day  and  night  over  our  thoughts,  our  sentiments,  and 
our  actions,  maintains  justice  in  this  world,  and  completes 
it  elsewhere.  If  there  be  no  Judge,  is  there  any  justice  in 
existence  other  than  that  organised  by  men,  not  only  by 
their  law  and  tribunals,  but  also  in  all  social  relations  not 
submitted  to  positive  judgment,  and  having,  as  a  rule,  no 
other  sanction  than  that  of  opinion,  the  confidence  or 
mistrust,  the  approbation  or  disapproval,  of  those  who 
surround  us?  ...  When  we  have  deceived  or  got  the 
better  of  our  neighbour,  have  we  deceived  and  got  the 
better  of  all  the  forces  of  justice  ?  Is  everything  definitely 
settled,  and  have  we  nothing  more  to  fear?  Or  does 
there  exist  a  justice  more  serious  and  less  liable  to  error, 
less  visible  but  more  profound,  more  universal  and  more 
powerful  ? 

Man  feels  with  irresistible  conviction  the  exist- 
ence of  such  a  justice.  But  where  does  it  dwell  if 
the  heavens  be  empty  ?  It  is  not  an  idle  question, 
for  on  the  answer  depends  the  whole  of  morality. 
Of  three  men,  the  first  of  whom  bases  his  morality 
on  the  will  of  God,  the  second  on  a  belief  in  some 
sort  of  physical  justice,  the  third  simply  on  his  per- 


110        SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

sonal  perception  of  justice,  the  third  is  the  only  one 
who  interests  the  moralist.  In  him  alone  is  morality 
really  autonomous ;  and  he  alone  will  survive  the 
other  two.  It  is  as  certain  as  anything  can  be  that 
the  source  of  justice  is  nowhere  in  the  physical 
universe  around  us.  'In  the  world  in  which  we 
live  there  is  no  physical  justice  proceeding  from 
moral  causes,  whether  such  justice  be  considered  to 
present  itself  under  the  form  of  heredity,  illness,  or 
of  atmospheric,  geological,  or  any  other  phenomena 
imaginable.'  Maeterlinck  analyses  a  few  of  our 
more  obvious  illusions  on  the  subject,  and  succeeds 
in  showing,  what  no  one  who  has  seriously  con- 
sidered the  question  can  doubt,  that  Nature  only 
punishes  breaches  of  physical  law,  with  an  entire 
disregard  of  the  moral  quality  of  such  breaches. 
*  There  is  within  us  a  spirit  which  weighs  only 
intentions,  there  is  without  us  a  power  which  weighs 
only  actions.'  The  '  spirit  which  weighs  only 
intentions ' ;  the  source  and  only  real  sanction  of 
morality  can,  however,  act  on  what  is  without, 
modifying  it  to  human  ends,  gradually  substituting 
the  hut  for  the  cave,  evolving  the  social  pact  out  of 
the  egotism  of  self-preservation,  the  family  out  of 
the  vagrant  impulses  of  the  promiscuous  savage. 
Thus  a  sort  of  physico-psychological  justice  is 
brought  about  which,  corresponding  within  the 
sphere  of  phenomena  subject  to  human  action  in  a 


MAETERLINCK  111 

manner  roughly  tolerable  to  our  desires,  makes  it 
possible  for  a  moral  creature  to  live  without  too 
much  discomfort  in  a  non-moral  universe.  '  Nature ' 
frequently  upsets  this  reign  of  human  law  by 
'accidents,'  and,  more  often  perhaps,  by  a  certain 
defect  of  comprehension,  a  certain  slowness  of 
adaptation  to  human  needs,  which  is,  at  times, 
peculiarly  exasperating.  The  idiotic  volcano  or 
the  stupid  storm  will,  at  any  moment,  still  for  ever 
'  Shakespeare's  brain  or  Lord  Christ's  heart.'  Yet 
not  altogether  ;  and  here  Maeterlinck  falls  back  on 
a  conception  which  it  is  difficult  not  to  call  mystical : 
the  conception  of  the  dynamic  unity  of  the  universal 
human  soul.  Whether  or  not  '  mute  inglorious 
Mil  tons '  lie  in  our  churchyards,  at  least  those  who 
sing,  sing  to  all  of  us  and  for  ever.  The  peasant 
who  passes  has  never  heard  of  Plato;  but  had 
Plato  not  thought  in  such  and  such  a  way,  his  own 
thoughts  would  have  been  different.  Wisdom,  as 
in  the  old  Jewish  book,  reaches  from  end  to  end, 
fortiter  et  suaviter  disponens  omnia.  This  fas- 
cinating doctrine  lies  outside  experimental  verifica- 
tion. It  has  a  long  history  behind  it ;  echoes  of  it 
come  from  the  lecture  halls  of  Alexandria  and  the 
banks  of  the  Ganges  ;  it  seems  implied  in  any 
adequate  view  of  the  '  interior  life/  And  there  will 
always  be  those  who  will  find  in  it  the  expression 
of  their  latent  conviction  ;  for  it  is  one  of  the  first, 


112         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

and  not  the  least  attractive,  of  the  paths  which  open 
before  humanity  on  its  homing  quest — if  indeed  it 
be  so — back  from  the  '  Many'  to  the  '  One.'  .  .  . 

Apart,  however,  from  such  mysticism,  Maeter- 
linck finds  a  stimulus  in  the  analysis  of  the  con- 
ditions of  this  man-made  justice.  Its  reach  is  much 
wider,  and  its  effect  much  deeper,  than  is  commonly 
supposed.  Here  is  a  noble  passage  which  cannot 
be  laid  too  much  to  heart : — 

We  willingly  place  under  the  heading,  '  Injustice  of 
the  Universe,'  a  great  number  of  injustices  exclusively 
human  and  infinitely  more  frequent  and  more  murderous 
than  the  tempest,  illness  and  fire.  I  do  not  speak  of 
war  ;  it  might  be  objected  to  me  that  it  is  attributed  less 
to  Nature  than  to  the  will  of  peoples  or  princes.  But 
poverty,  for  instance,  which  we  still  place  in  the  list  of 
irresponsible  evils  like  the  plague  or  shipwreck,  poverty 
with  its  crushing  griefs  and  hereditary  failures,  how  often 
is  it  not  imputable  to  the  injustice  of  our  social  state 
which  is  but  the  total  of  man's  injustices  ?  Why  at  the 
spectacle  of  an  unmerited  misery  do  we  seek  an  heavenly 
judge  or  an  impenetrable  cause,  as  if  it  were  the  affair  of 
a  stroke  of  lightning?  Do  we  forget  that  we  find  our- 
selves here  in  the  best  known  and  surest  part  of  our  own 
domain,  and  that  it  is  we  ourselves  who  organise  misery 
and  distribute  it  as  arbitrarily,  from  a  moral  point  of 
view,  as  the  fire  its  ravages,  or  sickness  its  sufferings? 
Is  it  reasonable  for  us  to  wonder  at  the  ocean  for  not 
taking  account  of  the  state  of  soul  of  its  victim,  when  we, 
who  have  a  soul,  that  is  to  say  the  organ  par  excellence 
of  justice,  pay  no  heed  to  the  innocence  of  thousands  of 
poor  wretches  who  are  our  victims  ? 


MAETERLINCK  113 

And  to  those  who,  with  the  '  complacent  religi- 
osity of  the  rich — that  execrable  sentiment,'  would 
object  that  virtue  and  happiness  are  independent 
of  material  conditions,  he  replies: — 

If  the  child  of  our  good  neighbour  be  born  blind, 
idiotic  or  deformed,  we  will  go  and  seek,  no  matter 
where,  even  in  the  darkness  of  a  religion  we  no  longer 
practise,  a  God  of  some  sort  to  interrogate  his  thought ; 
but  if  the  child  be  born  poor,  which  usually  lowers  no 
less  than  the  most  serious  infirmity  by  several  degrees 
the  destiny  of  a  being,  we  shall  not  dream  of  asking  a 
single  question  of  the  God  who  is  everywhere  where  we 
are,  since  he  is  made  of  our  will.  Before  desiring  an 
ideal  judge,  it  is  necessary  to  purify  our  ideas.  Before 
bewailing  the  indifference  of  Nature  and  seeking  an 
equity  which  is  not  there,  it  were  wise  to  attack,  in  our 
human  regions,  an  iniquity  which  is  there ;  and  when  it 
is  there  no  longer,  the  part  reserved  for  the  injustices  of 
chance  will  probably  appear  reduced  by  two-thirds.  It 
will,  in  any  case,  be  more  diminished  than  if  we  had  made 
the  storm  reasonable,  the  volcano  perspicacious,  the  ava- 
lanche prewarned,  heat  and  cold  circumspect,  sickness 
judicious,  the  sea  intelligent  and  attentive  to  our  virtues 
and  secret  intentions.  There  are,  in  fact,  many  more 
paupers  than  victims  of  shipwreck  or  material  accidents, 
and  many  more  maladies  due  to  misery  than  to  the 
caprices  of  our  organism  or  the  hostility  of  the  elements. 

Truly  a  comfortable  doctrine,  a  sound  and  godly 
form  of  words.  And  woe  to  our  ears  if  they  are 
too  delicate  to  hear  them ! 

Of  course  this  physico- psychological  justice, 
besides  being,  after  all,  limited  in  its  range,  is 

H 


114         SIX   MASTERS   IN  DISILLUSION 

evidently  imperfect  in  its  nature  from  a  moral 
point  of  view.  For  though  a  moral  intention  is 
essential  to  it,  that  intention  alone  will  not  produce 
it.  Power  is  required,  and  power  in  this  case  is 
knowledge.  Such  knowledge  is  within  the  reach 
of  persons  devoid  of  any  morality.  A  despicable 
character  might  quite  well  discover  the  secret  of 
what  we  call  gravitation.  And  though  the  applica- 
tion of  such  knowledge  to  human  needs  would  be 
materially  moral,  i.e.  it  would  coincide  with  the 
wider  uniformities  of  human  well-being,  it  might, 
in  the  mind  of  its  discoverer,  be  without  any  such 
quality.  It  would  then  pass  the  objective  test  of 
social  morality ;  but  it  would  lack  that  subjective 
sanction  of  conscious  loyalty  to  ethical  perception, 
without  which  there  is  for  man  no  real  morality 
whatever.  The  difficulty  comes,  not  from  the  fact 
that  there  is  no  morality  in  the  universe,  for  man 
is  part  of  the  universe  and  is  moral ;  but  from  the 
fact  that  the  power  of  the  universe  is  not  moral. 
The  maxim  that  knowledge  is  power  may  serve 
well  enough  in  the  class-room ;  and  power  of  a 
sort  of  course  it  is.  But  the  power  that  is  not 
knowledge,  that  recks  nothing  of  its  effects, 
envelops  it  as  the  ocean  the  drop  of  water.  Ces 
espaces  infinies  meffraient !  And  well  they  may  ; 
for  their  profoundest  depths  in  which  lie  the 
destinies  of  all  of  us,  are  void  of  mind  or  conscience. 


MAETERLINCK  115 

In  his  self-imposed  task  of  the  rationalisation  and 
moralisation  of  his  experience,  Man  is  alone  and, 
so  far  as  he  knows,  unaided.  On  this  point 
Maeterlinck  does  not  hesitate.  He  eschews  com- 
pletely the  dialectical  tours  de  force  of  liberalising 
theologians.  The  Kingdom  of  Heaven,  our  natural 
inheritance,  is  solely  within  us ;  it  exists  only  as 
an  ideal,  only  in  relation  to  human  appreciation 
and  discourse,  that  is,  to  our  mind  ;  Justice,  Mercy, 
Beauty,  Truth,  are  so  many  secretions  of  human 
consciousness,  as  silk  is  of  the  silk-worm. 

In  the  antinomy  between  man's  sense  of  justice 
and  the  indifference  of  the  power  which  has  brought 
him  forth,  our  modern  pessimists  find  the  essential 
tragedy  of  humanity.  'A  strange  mystery  it  is,' 
said  Mr.  Bertrand  Russell  in  a  remarkable  article 
published  some  years  ago  in  the  Independent 
Review?  '  that  nature,  omnipotent  but  blind,  in 
the  revolutions  of  her  secular  hurryings  through 
the  abyss  of  space,  has  brought  forth,  at  last, 
a  child,  subject  still  to  her  power,  but  gifted  with 
sight,  with  knowledge  of  good  and  evil,  with  the 
capacity  of  judging  the  works  of  his  unthinking 
mother.' 

But  is  not  such  pessimism  based  rather  on 
mythology  than  fact ;  is  it  not,  after  all,  but  an 
after-effect  of  supernaturalism  ?  For  Nature  is 

1  Independent  Review,  Dec.  1903,  'The  Free  Man's  Worship.' 


116         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

no  mother  from  whom  we  spring ;  rather  she  comes 
to  birth  in  our  brain.  It  is  only  under  the  action 
of  mind,  and  in  relation  thereto,  that  the  term 
acquires  either  unity  or  value.  Nature  as  a  term 
of  discourse,  to  which  predicable  values  can  be 
assigned,  exists  only  in  the  same  purely  ideal 
manner  as  Truth,  Beauty  and  Justice.  The 
generalisations  by  means  of  which  we  organise 
what  we  call  '  external,'  are  in  our  mind  no  less 
'  ideal '  than  those  we  employ  in  the  construction 
of  moral  values ;  their  locus  is  different,  that  is  all. 
The  Ideal  is  as  natural  as  the  Natural  is  ideal. 
It  will  nevertheless  be  said  that,  whether  the 
universe  be  the  child  of  our  brain  or  we  its  pro- 
duct, makes  no  difference  practically ;  equally  the 
facts  of  experience  are  there,  and  we  have  to  deal 
with  them.  It  is  amid  those  facts,  the  determina- 
tion of  which  is  beyond  our  conscious  control,  that 
our  destiny  is  laid.  Quite  so  ;  and  it  is  from  what 
is  known  of  the  human  process,  of  the  way  in 
which  man  has  dealt  with  these  facts,  in  the  past, 
that  a  sober  and  reasonable  hope  may  be  derived 
for  the  future.  In  one  of  his  finest  essays,  Les 
Rameaux  dOliviers,  Maeterlinck  states  calmly  his 
grounds  for  such  hope.  His  argument  there  is, 
briefly,  that  such  enormous  difficulties,  such  terrible 
dangers,  are  now  overcome,  that  we  need  not 
despair  of  the  future.  The  law  of  man's  progress 


MAETERLINCK  117 

has  been  the  growth  of  his  knowledge  of  his 
environment,  which  at  first  indeed  appears  hostile, 
but  which,  at  the  magic  touch  of  human  will  and 
brain,  shows  itself  more  and  more  plastic.  It  is 
as  if  Nature  were  coming  gradually  to  recognise 
her  master,  in  proportion  as  that  master  enters  by 
degrees  into  the  kingdom  of  reason  implicit  in  his 
consciousness.  Man  is,  on  the  whole,  wiser  and 
better ;  civilisation,  inadequate  as  its  actual  realisa- 
tion may  be,  is,  on  the  whole,  more  securely 
established  than  ever  before  on  the  planet ;  and 
the  vistas  of  knowledge  open  more  widely,  more 
surely,  more  radiantly.  If  anything  be  needed  to 
turn  the  balance  of  abstract  consideration,  we  are 
justified  in  trusting  to  that  indomitable  courage,  to 
that  unflagging  resolution  of  the  human  will,  to 
realise  by  its  creative  power  the  ideals  of  the 
spirit  which  has  brought  us  so  far  on  our  long 
pilgrimage. 

I  would  venture  to  add  a  consideration  which 
Maeterlinck  nowhere  explicitly  mentions,  although 
it  seems  to  be  implied  in  much  that  he  says.  By 
hypothesis  Man  is  no  supernatural  being  fallen 
from  above  into  the  universe.  From  the  point  of 
view  of  science,  he  is  the  result  of  the  forces  that 
at  an  earlier  stage  produced  less  complex  manifesta- 
tions of  life.  Does  not  this  belief,  instead  of 
making  for  pessimism,  as  so  many  seem  to  think, 


118         SIX  MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

rather  furnish  a  strong  ground  for  hope  ?  If  his 
origin  were  supernatural,  then  indeed  Man  might 
find  himself  at  perpetual  variance  with  his  environ- 
ment But  if  he  is  himself  the  product  of  that 
environment,  must  not  the  equilibrium  without 
which  he  could  neither  have  appeared  nor  have 
maintained  himself  in  existence  come  at  length  to 
express  itself  in  the  harmony  of  his  consciousness  ? 
Maeterlinck  is  certainly  one  of  those  who  con- 
tribute towards  the  grounds  for  thinking  so,  mainly 
by  the  exquisite  single-mindedness  with  which  he 
approaches  the  moral  question,  and  which  he  in- 
evitably communicates  to  a  sympathetic  reader. 
Not  perhaps,  since  Pascal,  has  a  European  thinker 
vindicated  so  suggestively,  so  convincingly,  the 
true  dignity  of  the  human  intellect,  the  moral 
qualities  inevitably  inherent  in  the  formation  of 
opinion.  And  it  is  with  those  great  words  of 
Pascal,  which  so  ^ptly  resume  the  value  of  Maeter- 
linck as  a  moralist,  that  I  will  bring  this  essay  to 
a  close  :  '  All  our  dignity  consists  then  in  thought. 
It  is  from  thought  that  we  should  take  our  point 
of  departure,  not  from  space  or  duration,  which  we 
can  in  nowise  fill.  Let  us  therefore  labour  to 
think  correctly  :  that  is  the  principle  of  morality.' 


ANATOLE   FRANCE  119 


ANATOLE    FRANCE 

'  THE  longer  I  contemplate  human  life,  the  more  I 
believe  that  we  must  give  it,  for  witnesses  and 
judges,  Irony  and  Pity,  even  as  the  Egyptians 
evoked  over  their  dead  the  goddesses  I  sis  and 
Nephtis.  Irony  and  Pity  are  two  good  counsellors. 
The  one  smiles  and  makes  life  amiable ;  the  other 
weeps  and  makes  it  sacred.  The  irony  which  I 
invoke  is  not  cruel.  It  mocks  neither  love  nor 
beauty.  It  is  gentle  and  kind.  Its  laugh  calms 
anger ;  and  it  teaches  us  to  smile  at  wicked  men 
and  fools  whom,  without  it,  we  might  have  the 
weakness  to  hate.' 

These  are  the  words  of  a  wise  man  and  of  a 
good  man.  They  are,  in  addition,  the  profession 
of  faith  of  perhaps  the  first  living  writer  of  French 
prose.  M.  Anatole  France,  the  creator  of  Sylvestre 
Bonnard,  of  the  Abbe  Jer6me  Coignard,  of  M. 
Bergeret,  and  of  other  charming  companions  of 
the  hours  snatched  from  those  dreamlike  futilities 
which  make  up  what  we  call  real  life,  is  not  only  a 
writer  of  fiction.  I  do  not  like  to  say  that  he  is 


120         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

greater  than  that,  lest,  in  the  event  of  these  lines 
ever  reaching  the  Master's  eye,  I  should  provoke  a 
certain  quiet  smile,  which,  envisaged  in  imagination 
only,  may  well  give  the  critic  pause.  At  least  I 
may  be  permitted  to  say  that  he  is  more  than  that. 
He  is  an  historian  of  no  common  erudition  ;  he  is 
a  poet ;  he  is  a  philosopher. 

The  last  qualification  may  be  disputed.  Since 
that  birthday  of  philosophy  on  which  our  distant 
ancestor  first  observed  that  all  serpents  had  more 
in  common  than  of  differentiation,  philosophers 
have  disagreed,  not  only  on  the  proper  way  to 
conduct  their  business,  but  as  to  the  precise  nature 
of  the  business  itself.  Mr.  Webster  tells  us  that 
philosophy  is  '  the  love  of,  including  the  search  for, 
wisdom ' :  thus  revealing,  in  a  phrase,  the  paradox 
at  the  core  of  every  true  philosopher's  heart.  For 
he  loves  what  he  has  not  found,  what,  doubtless,  no 
man  will  ever  find.  He  rises  early  and  rests  late, 
and  diligently  sweeps  his  house,  like  the  woman  in 
the  parable  ;  but  that  precious  penny  still  eludes 
his  subtlest  search.  The  wisest  are  those  who, 
recognising  this,  find  their  account  in  so  seemingly 
untoward  a  circumstance. 

It  can  hardly  be  doubted  that  if,  in  an  ill-advised 
moment,  it  were  to  occur  to  the  high  gods  to  repair 
their  blunders  by  admitting  man  to  the  comprehen- 
sion of  their  eternal  counsels,  the  day  that  they 


ANATOLE   FRANCE  121 

did  so  would  mark  the  beginning  of  the  end  of 
humanity.  Thought  would  cease,  and  man  would 
slowly  begin  with  listless  tread,  to  descend  the 
angel-guarded  ladder  of  flame  which  reaches  from 
the  earth  of  his  origin  to  the  heaven  of  his 
aspiration.  And  the  place  of  his  alighting  would 
be  no  Bethel ;  it  would  be  the  primitive  hole  on 
the  hillside,  which,  not  so  very  long  ago,  he  shared 
with  rat  and  wolf.  For  curiosity  is  the  mother 
of  wisdom,  last  and  most  gratuitous,  yet  most 
essential  of  man's  inventions  ;  while  life  only 
maintains  itself  in  virtue  of  a  constant  effort  to 
surpass  its  achievement.  Of  these  wisest  philo- 
sophers is  the  subject  of  this  essay. 

M.  France  is  of  the  line  of  the  great  sceptics,  the 
salt  of  whose  questionings  has  never  been  wanting 
to  freshen  the  stream  of  human  speculation.  Far 
back  that  lineage  stretches  to  legendary  Pyrrho 
and  fabled  Kapila,  and  doubtless  far  beyond  them 
again  ;  for  Doubt  and  Thought  are  the  twin 
springs  of  the  mind.  The  habit  and  aspect  of  the 
sceptic  vary  from  age  to  age.  He  has,  as  a 
philosopher,  no  quarrel  with  the  apparent  values 
of  experience  ;  rather,  with  more  than  Protean 
ingenuity,  he  welcomes  them  all  in  turn.  Let  the 
banquet  of  life  be  as  varied,  as  sumptuous,  as 
delicate  as  possible ;  soon  enough  the  cup  must  be 
turned  down  and  the  garland  doffed. 


122         SIX  MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

Yon  rising  Moon  that  looks  for  us  again — 
How  oft  hereafter  will  she  wax  and  wane ; 
How  oft  hereafter,  rising,  look  for  us — 
Through  this  same  garden  and,  for  one,  in  vain  ! 

Meanwhile  that  moon  shines  on  Rose-in-hand's 
lips  and  eyes ;  and  the  scent  of  the  night  is  on  her 
hair  and  arms.  Nor  are  these  the  only  values  of 
life.  In  an  attic  of  a  dormer-roofed,  seventeenth- 
century  Dutch  house,  sits  a  man  still  in  the  prime  of 
life.  He  has  left  both  his  tables,  the  one  strewed 
with  manuscripts,  the  other  with  optical  instru- 
ments, to  watch  a  spider's  duel.  To  a  close 
observer,  the  brightness  of  his  eye,  the  flush  on  his 
cheek  surely  indicate  the  mortal  disease  which  in  a 
year  or  two  will  cut  him  off.  On  the  termination  of 
the  fight  he  returns  to  his  desk,  and  writes  the 
words  :  '  The  free  man  thinks  of  nothing  less  than 
of  death.'  The  calm  peace  of  his  expression, 
shining  through  the  ravages  of  disease,  shows  that 
his  heart  is  set  on  the  love  of  the  Eternal,  the 
contemplation  of  which  brings  nothing  but  pure 
joy.  Again.  In  a  ravine  of  the  Umbrian  high- 
lands kneels  a  man,  clothed  in  ash-coloured  sack- 
cloth. His  eyes  red  with  weeping,  are  fixed  on  a 
roughly  fashioned  crucifix ;  his  hands  clasped  in 
prayer,  and  his  bare  feet — O  miracle  of  love ! — are 
pierced  and  bedewed  with  blood.  A  wounded  doe 
lies  close,  with  broken  leg  deftly  bound  up  by  the 


ANATOLE   FRANCE  123 

Saint's  art,  watching  her  master  with  liquid  eye. 
She  does  not  understand  the  meaning  of  his  sighs 
and  tears,  but,  being  fain  to  comfort  him,  pokes, 
from  time  to  time,  a  foolish  tender  muzzle  among 
the  folds  of  his  robe.  The  Saint  turns  with  a 
smile,  and  caresses  his  little  friend  ;  and  the  blood, 
which  symbolises  the  ransom  of  mankind,  stains 
her  white-starred  forehead,  innocent  alike  of  sin 
and  redemption.  Who  shall  estimate  the  rapture 
of  that  man  ?  Also  who,  asks  the  sceptic,  shall 
determine,  without  fear  of  gainsaying,  whether  the 
Persian  reveller,  Spinoza  or  St.  Francis,  be  nearer 
to  the  truth  of  things  ? 

Just  as  the  sceptic  looks  with  philosophic  impar- 
tiality on  the  differing  manifestations  of  life  con- 
tained in  the  bosom  of  universal  Nature,  so  also 
there  is  nothing  in  his  system  to  prevent  his 
adoption,  for  personal  use,  of  such  manifestations 
as  may  seem  to  him  especially  worthy. 

According  as  heredity,  circumstances,  personal 
taste  may  dictate,  he  will  be  a  voluptuary  or  an 
ascetic,  a  reactionary  or  a  revolutionary,  irreligious 
or  devout.  But  in  no  case  will  he  pay  himself  with 
words.  If,  for  instance,  he  be  devout,  he  will  not 
attempt  to  sophisticate  his  mind  or  dim  his  soul 
with  the  fancied  pros  and  cons  of  the  case  :  he 
will  frankly  recognise  his  temperamental  need  of 
religion,  and  boldly  rest  his  faith  on  those  reasons 


124        SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

of  the  heart  of  which  the  reason  is  ignorant,  and 
which,  however  respectable  as  motives,  are,  in  truth, 
as  he  well  knows,  no  reasons  at  all.  Of  M.  France 
it  may  be  said  that,  though  hardly  to  be  called 
devout,  he  has  certainly  engaged  himself '  on  the 
side  of  the  angels.' 

Anatole  Frangois  Thibault  (the  name  '  France ' 
is  a  pseudonym)  was  born  in  Paris  in  1844.  'It 
seems  to  me  impossible,'  he  says  in  his  Livre  de 
Mon  Ami,  the  charming  autobiography  of  his 
childhood,  '  to  have  quite  a  commonplace  mind  if 
one  has  been  brought  up  on  the  quays  of  Paris,  in 
front  of  the  Louvre  and  the  Tuileries,  near  the 
Palais  Mazarin,  in  front  of  the  glorious  Seine, 
flowing  between  the  towers  and  turrets  of  old 
Paris.'  His  father,  M.  Noel  Thibault,  a  well- 
known  bibliophile,  followed  that  most  fascinating 
pursuit,  the  second-hand  book  trade.  He  was  no 
ordinary  bookseller,  but  employed  his  great  know- 
ledge in  the  collection  of  rare  volumes.  The  talk 
of  his  father's  friends  provided  a  literary  atmosphere 
for  Anatole's  childhood.  Thus  he  learned  the 
elements  of  the  religion  of  books  which,  even  in  its 
fetichistic  stage  only,  has  consoled  so  many.  His 
mother,  towards  whom  he  practised  that  culte  de  la 
ma  mere  which  is  so  fine  and  general  a  note  of  the 
French  character,  was  a  simple  and  devout  person, 
of  warm  heart  and  great  good  sense.  It  was  her 


ANATOLE   FRANCE  125 

love,  no  doubt,  that  fostered  that  intensely  human 
quality  which  was  later  to  become  so  marked  a 
characteristic  of  M.  France's  work  at  his  best. 
Mme.  Thibault  would  read  saints'  lives  to  the  little 
Anatole  with,  on  one  occasion,  somewhat  surprising 
results.  The  episode  is  related  in  the  Livre  de 
Mon  Ami. 

My  mother  used  often  to  read  to  me  the  Lives  of  the 
Saints,  to  which  I  listened  with  delight,  and  which  filled 
my  soul  with  surprise  and  love.  I  knew  now  how  the 
men  of  the  Lord  managed  to  make  their  lives  precious 
and  full  of  merit ;  I  knew  the  celestial  fragrance  diffused 
by  the  roses  of  martyrdom.  But  martyrdom  was  an 
extremity  on  which  I  did  not  decide.  Nor  did  I  dwell 
on  the  apostolate  or  on  preaching  which  were  hardly 
within  my  reach.  I  confined  myself  to  austerities  as 
being  both  easy  and  sure.  In  order  to  abandon  myself 
to  them  without  delay,  I  refused  to  eat  my  breakfast. 
My  mother,  who  did  not  at  all  understand  my  new 
vocation,  thought  I  was  ill,  and  looked  at  me  with  an 
uneasiness  which  distressed  me.  But  none  the  less  I 
continued  to  fast.  Then,  recollecting  St.  Simon  Stylites, 
who  lived  on  the  top  of  a  column,  I  climbed  on  to  the 
kitchen  pump ;  but  I  could  not  live  there,  because  Julia, 
the  servant,  promptly  took  me  down.  Having  descended 
from  my  pump,  I  ardently  rushed  forward  on  the  road  of 
perfection  and  determined  to  imitate  St.  Nicholas  of 
Patras,  who  distributed  his  riches  to  the  poor.  The 
window  of  my  father's  study  overlooked  the  quay.  I 
threw  out  of  his  window  a  dozen  coppers  which  had  been 
given  me  because  they  were  new  and  shining;  then  I 
hurled  out  my  marbles  and  tops  and  my  big  peg  top  with 
its  eel-skin  whip. 


126         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

'  This  child  is  idiotic  ! '  exclaimed  my  father,  shutting 
the  window.  I  experienced  anger  and  shame  at  hearing 
myself  judged  in  this  way.  But  I  reflected  that  my 
father,  not  being  a  saint  like  myself,  would  not  share  with 
me  in  the  glory  of  the  blessed  ;  and  this  thought  was  a 
great  consolation  to  me. 


St.  Theresa's  childish  dreams  of  martyrdom  were 
shattered  by  contact  with  reality  in  the  shape  of  a 
Philistine  uncle.  Anatole  France's  youthful  aspira- 
tions after  sanctity — he  told  his  mother  that  he 
longed  to  write  after  his  name  Ermite  et  Saint  du 
Calendrier,  in  emulation  of  the  honorific  suffixes 
which  took  so  much  room  on  his  father's  visiting 
cards — were  dissolved  by  the  even  pressure,  as  one 
might  say,  by  the  force  of  inertia  of  the  kindly 
irresponsive  domestic  atmosphere.  Sanctity  as  a 
career  was  a  failure  ;  but  the  child  was  too 
thoroughly  imbued  with  the  national  passion  for 
'  la  gloire '  not  to  seek  some  other  means  of  self- 
illustration.  After  all  his  unregenerate  father, 
though  heaven  was  closed  to  him,  enjoyed  much 
respect,  and  could  write  any  number  of  '  soul- 
enhancing'  epithets  after  his  name.  Perhaps  his 
interests  might  furnish  materials  for  a  career.  So 
the  future  Academician  came  to  conceive  his  first 
literary  project :  that  of  writing  a  history  of  France 
in  fifty  volumes.  At  the  moment  of  this  resolution 
he  was  still  of  tender  years,  so  tender,  in  fact,  that 


ANATOLE  FRANCE  127 

he  would  weep  when  his  nurse  attended  to  such 
elementary  details  of  his  toilet  as  his  nose.  More- 
over, he  could  not  read.  But,  as  he  had  already 
intuitively  divined,  material  difficulties  or  even 
impossibilities  do  not  operate  in  the  same  order  of 
things  as  the  idea.  It  may  be  well  to  add  that 
these  fifty  volumes  have  never  existed  save  sub 
specie  aeternitatis.  If  space  permitted,  I  could 
linger  much  longer  over  this  charming  book, 
written  in  the  perfection  of  M.  France's  style,  in 
the  maturity  of  his  genius ;  it  was  published  in 
1885.  It  is  an  unusually  happy  specimen  of  the 
genre  Confessions.  The  fresh  ingenuousness  of  its 
manner  is  rare  enough  in  autobiography. 

As  he  grew  older,  his  father  sent  him  to  the 
well-known  College  Stanislaus.  Here  that  taste 
for  Greek  and  Roman  antiquity,  which  has  through 
life  meant  so  much  to  him,  declared  itself  unmistak- 
ably. He  was  fascinated  by  Sophocles  and  Virgil. 
Not  altogether,  however,  in  a  way  agreeable  to  his 
professors.  The  boy  was  a  dreamer,  and  loved  to 
wander  down  those  bypaths  of  scholarship  which 
do  not  lead  to  success  in  examinations.  He  tells 
us  that  his  'Latin  prose  contained  solecisms.' 
Another  cause  of  his  unpopularity  with  his  teachers 
was  his  strongly  marked  inclination  to  elude  the 
religious  discipline  which  was  so  accentuated  a 
feature  of  Mgr.  Dupanloup's  educational  system. 


128        SIX  MASTERS   IN  DISILLUSION 

As  he  said  at  Treguier,  of  Renan,  his  mind  realised 
very  quickly  the  difficulties  of  belief.  Or  rather, 
perhaps,  his  imaginative  outlook  was  filled  up  and 
contented  by  the  great  figures  of  classical  antiquity 
in  a  way  which  left  no  void  for  religion  to  fill. 
He  says,  to  quote  once  more  from  the  Livre 
de  Mon  Ami : — 

I  saw  Thetis,  rising  like  a  white  cloud  over  the  sea. 
I  saw  Nausicaa  and  her  companions,  and  the  palm-tree 
of  Delos,  and  the  sky  and  the  earth,  and  the  ocean,  and 
Andromache  smiling  through  her  tears.  ...  I  understood. 
I  felt  It  was  impossible  for  me  for  six  months  to  put 
down  the  Odyssey. 

The  ancient  gods  had  forestalled  their  successor  ; 
Anatole  France  as  a  child  was  anima  naturaliter 
pagana. 

M.  France  commenced  author  with  a  small 
volume  of  verse  called  Vers  Dorts,  under  the 
aegis  of  Leconte  de  Lisle.  But  the  orthodoxy 
of  Parnassus  soon  became  too  strait  for  him ;  and 
the  great  man  does  not  seem  to  have  taken  in 
good  part  the  heresies  and,  at  last,  the  complete 
defection  of  his  brilliant  but  too  individualist 
disciple.  Poetry,  however,  of  which  he  has  always 
remained  an  ardent  lover  and  penetrating  critic, 
was  not  to  him  a  really  authentic  means  of  self- 
expression.  He  had  the  faculty  of  writing  verse, 
as  most  great  literary  artists  have ;  but  prose  was 


ANATOLE  FRANCE  129 

the  medium  most  fitted  for  his  essentially  medita- 
tive and  discursive  nature.  He  soon  produced 
his  Thais,  a  veritable  poem  in  prose,  in  which 
the  luxurious  tones  of  Byzantine  decadence  were 
artfully  married  with  the  bleak  ascetic  values  of 
the  Egyptian  desert.  M.  France  has  always  had 
a  weakness  for  monachism,  and  has  frequently 
returned  to  the  subject. 

The  work  which  first  really  called  on  him  the 
attention  of  the  public  was  Le  Crime  de  Sylvestre 
Bonnard,  published  in  1881,  which  was  crowned 
by  the  Academy.  In  this  delightful  book,  France 
recreated  the  type  of  the  old  savant  whose  innocent 
egotism  is  qualified  by  a  more  than  average  dose 
of  human  kindness.  The  reader  will  not  expect 
to  be  taken  through  a  catalogue  raisonnt  of  M. 
France's  work.  One  may  say  briefly,  that  he  has 
written  a  great  deal,  and  hardly  anything  except, 
perhaps,  if  the  criticism  may  be  ventured,  Le  Lys 
Rouge  and  the  Histoire  Comique,  that  is  without 
the  peculiar  and  intimate  charm  that  has  come  to 
be  associated  with  his  name. 

It  is  in  La  Rotisserie  de  la  Reine  Ptdauque  and 
its  sequel,  Les  Opinions  de  M.  Jerome  Coignard, 
that  he  has  succeeded  in  expressing  himself 
supremely.  In  these  books  his  fantasy  and  (an 
enemy  would  say)  his  sophistry  are  suffused  with 
so  rich  a  glow  of  kindly  humanity  as  to  be  quite 


130        SIX  MASTERS  IN  DISILLUSION 

irresistible.  We  may  disapprove  of  the  Abbe* 
Coignard :  it  is  our  right  as  law-abiding  citizens 
and  respectable  churchmen  to  do  so ;  but  it  is 
impossible  even  to  think  of  him  without  secret 
joy.  Poor  M.  Jerome!  so  great  and  so  little, 
so  noble  and  so  vile,  who  forgets  his  cassock 
in  the  tavern,  and  his  priesthood  in  the  arms  of 
the  '  fern  me  de  chambre  de  Madame  la  Baillive'; 
who  discourses  of  morals  with  the  eloquence  of 
Seneca,  yet  cheats  at  cards  and  pilfers  jewels  ; 
who  combines  the  most  daring  flights  of  specula- 
tion with  the  simplicity  of  true  Christian  faith ; 
and  who,  after  a  vagabond  existence  among 
wenches  and  pot-boys,  eked  out,  according  to 
circumstances,  by  deciphering  Egyptian  manu- 
scripts or  writing  love-letters  for  maid-servants, 
finally  dies  a  holy  and  edifying  death  from  the 
effects  of  a  wound  received  in  the  course  of  a 
disreputable  adventure — what  are  we  to  say  of 
him,  and  why  do  we  love  him  ?  The  reason  of 
our  love  is  not  far  to  seek.  And  we  may  turn  for 
it  to  a  doctor  of  the  Abbe  Coignard's  communion. 
In  the  Dream  of  Gerontius,  Cardinal  Newman 
sums  up  the  balance  sheet  of  a  man  as  : — 

Majesty  dwarfed  to  baseness,  poisonous  flower  running  to 

seed; 

Who  never  art  so  near  to  crime  and  shame 
As  when  thou  hast  achieved  some  deed  of  name. 


ANATOLE   FRANCE  131 

We  love  M.  Jerome  Coignard  because  he  is  a 
living,  sensible  epitome  of  humanity,  of  our  own 
hearts.  Thus  and  thus  are  we,  though  it  may 
not  suit  us  to  admit  the  fact.  And,  oddly  enough, 
in  spite  of  this  invincible  disinclination,  the  vicarious 
unveiling  of  our  own  hearts  gives  us  a  pleasure  of 
a  most  delightful  quality,  such  epicures  in  moral 
sensation  have  we  become.  It  gives  us  the  illusion 
of  the  confession  we  shall  never  make,  of  the 
sincerity  we  shall  never  achieve.  And  the  illusion 
also  of  that  peace  of  heart,  which,  as  theologians 
assure  us,  is  the  accompaniment  and  reward  of 
true  contrition.  So  we  have  ample  motives  for 
loving  M.  Jerome  Coignard.  This  great  and 
good  man,  at  once  philosopher  and  hedge  priest, 
a  splendid  toper  and  an  accomplished  scholar,  is 
first  introduced  to  us  in  the  roasting  shop  of 
Leonard  Menetrier,  who  plies  his  laudable  trade 
in  the  Rue  St.  Jacques,  at  the  sign  of  La  Reine 
Ptdauque.  Here  the  Abb6  finds  his  daily  cover 
laid  in  return  for  the  instructions  which  he  gives 
the  roaster's  son  Jacques,  commonly  called  Tourne- 
broche,  in  virtue  of  the  office  which  he  shares 
with  the  dog  Miraut.  This  Jacques  becomes  his 
master's  devoted  disciple  and  biographer.  We 
will  not  follow  them  through  their  adventures, 
which  include  the  frequentation  of  a  charming 
and  crazy  hermetic  philosopher  (an  admirably 


132         SIX   MASTERS  IN   DISILLUSION 

reconstructed  eighteenth-century  type),  some 
incidental  fighting,  and  more  than  one  episode 
of  the  kind  that,  in  France,  legitimately  adds  to 
the  gaiety  of  life,  and,  in  England,  is  never 
mentioned.  Let  us,  rather,  briefly  dwell  on  the 
ideas  conveyed  by  these  delightful  books.  They 
represent,  with  the  conversations  of  M.  Bergeret 
in  the  four  volumes  of  the  Histoire  Contemporaine, 
the  ripest  moods  of  M.  France's  philosophy,  a 
philosophy  which,  due  allowance  being  made  for 
temperamental  variations — the  inevitable  sanction 
of  which  is  one  of  its  principal  charms — is  held, 
in  substance,  by  many  of  the  best  minds  in  Europe 
to-day. 

I  have  already  indicated  the  school  of  thought 
to  which  M.  France  belongs.  He  is  of  the 
great  school  of  Elis,  the  school  of  Pyrrho.  With 
the  nuance,  however,  of  his  time.  He  has  expressly 
told  us,  in  his  answer  to  M.  Brunetiere,  who  had 
attacked  him  as  a  mere  subjectivist,  self-dispensed 
from  the  arduous  labour  of  exact  knowledge,  that 
he  believes  in  'the  relativity  of  things  and  the 
succession  of  phenomena ' :  that  is  in  science.  M. 
France  believes  then  in  science ;  but  let  not 
dogmatists  of  any  kind,  even  those  who  frequent 
the  Royal  Institution,  presume  to  hail  him  as  a 
fellow.  '  What,'  asks  the  Abbe"  Coignard,  '  is  the 
knowledge  of  Nature  but  the  fantasy  of  our 


ANATOLE  FRANCE  133 

senses?'  This  is  discouraging;  and  it  seems  as 
if  the  saintly  immobility,  the  blessed  ataraxy  of 
the  fakir,  would  be  the  practical  translation  of 
such  an  attitude.  On  the  contrary,  no  man  is 
more  interested  in  life  than  he.  No  detail  of 
humanity's  long  pilgrimage  escapes  his  affectionate 
curiosity.  His  faithful  love  of  men  and  their 
doings  is,  rather  than  the  mere  abstract  passion 
of  erudition,  at  the  bottom  of  his  ceaseless  interest 
in  history.  The  fact  is  that  the  teachings  of 
Pyrrho  are  at  once  reinforced  in  his  mind,  and 
qualified  by  those  of  another  Greek  philosopher, 
the  divine  Epicurus. 

Walter  Savage  Landor  used  to  say  that  we 
should  walk  through  life  with  Epicurus  on  the 
one  hand  and  Epictetus  on  the  other.  In  a 
similar  vein  M.  France  says  that  the  former 
philosopher  and  St.  Francis  of  Assisi  are  the 
two  best  friends — and  mutual  correctives — that 
humanity  has  found  on  its  path  through  the 
world.  The  Stoic  rigour  is  alien  to  his  temperate 
and  kindly  wisdom :  '  II  ne  faut  pas  exagerer  le 
mal  que  Ton  fait.'  Rather  would  he  extol  the 
golden  moderation  of  the  garden  philosopher,  and 
dwell  on  the  Preacher's  advice  not  to  be  wise 
overmuch.  The  temper  of  that  colony  perched 
on  '  a  certain  breezy  tableland  projecting  from  the 
African  coast,'  of  which  Mr.  Pater  has  written  so 


134        SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

delightfully,  is  his.  A  true  Cyrenaic,  Horace's 
summing  up  of  the  philosophy  of  the  founder  of 
Cyrene  may  be  justly  applied  to  him :  omnis 
Aristippum  decuit  color  et  status  et  res. 

Indeed,  Aristippus  is  nearer  to  him  than  Pyrrho. 
The  latter  had  thrown  the  universal  doubt  that  lies 
coiled  at  the  root  of  knowledge — '  the  little  dead 
red  worm  therein' — into  a  blank  abstract  interrog- 
ative ;  but  he,  apparently,  did  not  realise  that  life 
and  speculation  are  two  things,  that,  even  though 
both  we  ourselves  and  the  appearances  that  dance 
over  our  sensorium,  are  from  the  point  of  view  of 
speculative  analysis,  but  vain  shadows  together, 
that  fact  does  not  make  them  or  us  any  less  inter- 
esting, does  not  even  tend  to  lower  or  qualify  in 
any  way  their  human  value.  For  it  is  evident  that 
that  value  springs  wholly  from  the  undeniable 
experience  of  relation ;  what  exactly  is  related  to 
what  is  irrelevant.  At  least  it  is  charitable  to 
suppose  that,  when  Pyrrho  passed  his  master 
Aristarchus  wailing  for  help  in  a  ditch,  on  the 
ground  that  his  unfortunate  plight  stood  in  need 
of  metaphysical  proof,  he  mixed  up  two  things. 
And  it  is  certainly  impossible  to  imagine  that 
M.  France  would  have  left  Renan,  his  one  master 
among  moderns,  in  a  ditch  for  such  reasons. 

It  is  characteristic  of  M.  France's  detachment 
from  popular,  or  indeed  any  kind  of  polemics,  that, 


ANATOLE   FRANCE  135 

while  he  himself  remains  scrupulously,  and  it  would 
seem  unregretfully  un-Christian,  his  most  important 
philosophical  protagonist  should  be  a  Catholic 
priest.  No  doubt  he  has  expressed  his  personal 
attitude  more  fully  in  his  Bergeret  of  the  Histoire 
Contemporaine.  But  M.  Bergeret  is  by  no  means 
so  convincing  or  so  attractive  as  M.  Coignard. 
Dare  one  say  it  ?  He  is  at  times  distinctly  tedious. 
Whether  it  is  that  he  suffers  unduly  from  his  sordid 
domestic  surroundings,  or  from  the  stifling  atmo- 
sphere of  his  gossiping  little  university,  or  from 
what  strikes  a  foreign  observer  as  the  abject  pro- 
vincialism of  contemporary  French  public  life,  one 
certainly  grows  weary  of  him.  Not  so  of  M.  Coig- 
nard. To  him  M.  France  has  dispensed  all  his 
inimitable  charm  ;  he  has  lavished  on  him  the  finest 
resources  of  his  art.  That  he  should  have  done  so 
is,  as  I  have  said,  characteristic  of  his  detachment 
from  popular  causes ;  it  also  surely  indicates  the 
exquisite  fairness,  the  crystalline  probity  of  his 
mind.  Not  thus  are  philosophers  wont  to  treat 
philosophers  who  have  the  misfortune  to  differ 
from  them.  Schopenhauer — no  doubt  the  case  was 
exceptional — called  Hegel  by  name  and  in  print 
an  'intellectual  Caliban'  and  a  'charlatan.'  But  to 
return  to  our  Abbe ! , 

I   cannot  do  better  than  make  some  quotations 
from  M.  France's  own  analysis  of  his  hero  : — 


136        SIX  MASTERS   IN  DISILLUSION 

I  am  not  afraid  to  affirm  that  M.  l'Abb£  Coignard, 
philosopher  and  Christian,  united  in  an  incomparable 
combination  the  Epicureanism  that  preserves  us  from 
pain  and  the  holy  simplicity  that  leads  us  to  joy.  It  is 
remarkable  that,  not  only  did  he  accept  the  idea  of  God 
as  it  was  provided  for  him  by  the  Catholic  faith,  but  also 
that  he  endeavoured  to  maintain  it  by  arguments  of  a 
rational  order.  He  never  imitated  the  practical  ability 
of  professional  Deists  who  make,  for  their  own  use,  a  God, 
at  once  moral,  philanthropic,  and  modest  (pudigue),  with 
whom  they  enjoy  the  satisfaction  of  a  perfect  under- 
standing. The  close  relations  which  they  establish  with 
him  procure  for  their  writings  a  great  deal  of  authority, 
and  for  their  persons  much  consideration  from  the  public. 
And  this  governmental  God,  moderate,  solemn,  free  from 
all  fanaticism,  and  who  knows  the  world  (qui  a  du  monde), 
recommends  them  in  assemblies,  drawing-rooms,  and 
academies.  M.  1'Abbe  Coignard  did  not  fashion  to  him- 
self so  profitable  an  Eternal.  But,  reflecting  that  it  is 
impossible  to  conceive  of  the  universe,  except  under  the 
categories  of  the  intelligence,  and  that  the  Cosmos  must 
be  held  to  be  intelligible,  even  in  view  of  the  demonstra- 
tion of  its  absurdity,  he  referred  its  cause  to  an  intelli- 
gence which  he  called  God,  leaving  to  this  term  its  infinite 
vagueness,  while  for  the  rest  he  went  to  theology,  which, 
as  we  know,  treats  of  the  unknowable  with  a  minute 
exactitude.  This  reserve  which  marks  the  limits  of  his 
intelligence  was  a  happy  one  if,  as  I  think,  it  removed 
from  him  the  temptation  to  nibble  at  some  appetising 
system  of  philosophy,  and  saved  him  from  pushing  his 
nose  into  one  of  those  mouse-traps  in  which  the  emanci- 
pated spirits  hasten  to  get  caught.  At  his  ease  in  the 
great  old  rat-hole,  he  found  more  than  one  issue  through 
which  to  discover  the  world  and  observe  nature.  I  do 
not  share  his  religious  beliefs,  and  I  think  that  they 


ANATOLE  FRANCE  137 

deceived  him,  as  they  have  deceived  for  their  happiness 
and  misery  so  many  generations  of  men.  But  it  would 
seem  that  the  ancient  errors  are  less  annoying  than  the 
modern  ones,  and  that,  since  we  must  be  deceived,  the 
better  part  for  us  is  to  cling  to  the  illusions  which  have 
lost  their  roughness. 

So  much  for  the  Abbe  Coignard's  metaphysic 
and  theology.  His  attitude  towards  the  latter  was 
that  of  no  less  a  thinker  than  Descartes,  who  placed 
his  theology  under  the  segis  of  Pere  Mersenne. 
Let  us  now  hear  M.  France  on  his  ethic. 

Never  did  human  spirit  show  itself  at  once  so  bold 
and  so  pacific,  or  steep  its  disdain  in  greater  sweetness. 
His  ethic  united  the  liberty  of  the  cynical  philosophers 
with  the  candour  of  the  first  friars  of  the  holy  Portiun- 
cula.  He  despised  men  with  tenderness;  he  tried  to 
teach  them  that  the  only  side  on  which  they  had  a  little 
grandeur  being  a  capacity  for  pain,  the  one  useful  and 
beautiful  quality  for  them  was  pity ;  that  able  only  to 
desire  and  suffer,  they  should  make  to  themselves  indul- 
gent and  voluptuous  virtues.  He  thus  came  to  consider 
pride  the  only  source  of  the  greatest  evils,  and  the  only 
vice  contrary  to  nature.  It  would  seem  indeed  that  men 
make  themselves  miserable  by  the  exaggerated  feeling 
which  they  have  for  themselves  and  their  kind,  and  that,  if 
they  had  a  humbler  and  truer  idea  of  human  nature,  they 
would  be  gentler  to  each  other  and  themselves.  It  was 
his  benevolence  which  urged  him  to  humiliate  his  fellows 
in  their  sentiments,  their  knowledge,  their  philosophy,  and 
their  institutions.  He  had  it  at  heart  to  show  them  that 
their  imbecile  nature  has  neither  imagined  nor  con- 
structed anything  worthy  of  a  very  energetic  attack  or 
defence,  and  that,  if  they  knew  the  fragility  and  sim- 


138        SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

plicity  of  their  greatest  works,  such  as  their  laws  and 
their  empires,  they  would  fight  for  them  only  in  play  and 
for  fun,  like  children  who  build  sand  castles  on  the  beach. 
Moreover,  one  should  not  be  either  astonished  or  scan- 
dalised at  the  fact  that  he  abased  all  the  ideas  by  which 
man  exalts  his  glory  and  honour  at  the  expense  of  his 
repose.  The  majesty  of  the  law  did  not  impose  on  his 
clear-sighted  soul ;  and  he  regretted  that  poor  wretches 
should  be  subjected  to  so  many  obligations  of  which,  in 
most  cases,  one  can  discover  neither  the  origin  nor  the 
meaning.  All  principles  seemed  to  him  equally  contest- 
able.  He  had  come  to  believe  that  citizens  only  con- 
demned so  many  of  their  kind  to  infamy  in  order  to 
enjoy  by  contrast  the  joys  of  public  respect.  This  view 
made  him  prefer  bad  company  to  good,  after  the  example 
of  Him  who  lived  among  publicans  and  prostitutes.  He 
preserved  there  purity  of  heart,  the  gift  of  sympathy,  and 
the  treasures  of  mercy. 

M.  Coignard's  philosophy  showed  to  special 
advantage  in  his  criticism  of  social  justice,  militar- 
ism, magistrates,  police,  and  political  institutions 
generally.  Not  one  did  his  genial  and  mordant 
analysis  leave  standing.  Yet  he  was  no  revolu- 
tionary. He  was,  as  he  said,  like  the  old  woman 
of  Syracuse,  who  prayed  for  the  preservation  of 
the  existing  tyrant — the  worst,  she  observed,  that 
there  had  ever  been — on  the  ground  that  a  still 

O 

worse  one  would  surely  succeed  him.  He  seems 
to  have  believed  in  what  human  improvement  he 
thought  possible,  on  the  ground  of  an  ingenious 
application  to  moral  and  social  matters  of  the  law 


139 

of  '  actual  causes.'  Sir  Charles  Lyell,  as  is  known, 
maintained,  some  fifty  years  ago,  that  the  various 
changes  that  have  come  about  in  the  earth's  surface 
during  the  course  of  the  ages  were  not  due,  as  was 
then  commonly  supposed,  to  sudden  cataclysms, 
but  to  the  gradual  operation  of  slow  and  imper- 
ceptible causes,  which  to  this  day  continue  their 
silent  invisible  task  of  transforming  the  crust  of  the 
planet.  M.  Coignard  seems  to  have  applied  the 
analogy  of  Lyell 's  theory  to  the  phenomena  of 
social  growth  and  development.  For  instance,  he 
hated  war,  partly  on  moral  grounds,  and  partly, 
no  doubt,  because,  as  Fontenelle  said,  it  inter- 
rupted conversation.  He  looked  forward  to  its 
disappearance,  not  as  the  result  of  any  conscious 
effort  of  humanity,  such  as  the  forcible  establish- 
ment of  courts  of  arbitration  and  the  like,  but 
rather  as  the  inevitable  consequence  of  a  perfect 
balance  of  power,  to  be  brought  about  at  last  by 
the  equalisation  of  the  armaments  of  rival  states. 
The  evil  would  thus  kill  itself.  Similarly,  the 
absurdities  of  legal  justice  would  at  length  reach 
such  a  point  as  gradually  to  melt  away  of  them- 
selves before  the  irony  of  a  human  being,  the  son 
of  our  loins,  rather  more  clear-sighted  than  his 
parents,  but  not  in  any  way  essentially  differing 
from  them.  So,  then,  the  Abbe  Coignard  believed 
in  justice,  and,  so  far,  was  no  sceptic?  Yes,  he 


140        SIX   MASTERS   IN  DISILLUSION 

believed  in  justice,  and  in  '  whatsoever  things  are 
of  good  report ' ;  but  he  did  not  think  that  the 
home  of  these  things  was  among  men.  Justice 
was  to  him  the  vanishing  point  of  the  perspective 
of  human  society,  the  ideal  existence  of  which  is 
necessarily  implied  in  all  human  aspiration,  while 
its  achievement,  as  a  fact,  is  as  necessarily  denied 
to  all  human  effort. 

We  may  note  here  a  profound  difference  between 
the  Abbe  Coignard's  doctrine  and  that  of  the 
Revolution.  That  great  movement  in  human 
affairs  was  based  on  the  belief  in  the  natural 
justice  of  Man.  Condorcet  is  as  clear  on  this 
point  as  Jean  -  Jacques.  The  Abbe  Coignard 
would  have  said  that  man,  being  naturally  unjust, 
tends  obscurely  and  intermittently  to  improve  him- 
self in  the  direction  of  justice,  but  that  unjust  he 
is  by  nature  and  unjust  by  nature  he  always  will 
remain.  He  held  no  illusions  about  humanity. 
Had  he  been  able,  with  prophetic  mind,  to  gauge 
the  great  biological  generalisation  which  has  in 
modern  times  so  profoundly  modified  all  our 
thoughts  concerning  man  and  his  destiny,  there  is 
little  doubt  that  he  would  have  sided  with  Darwin 
against  Rousseau.  His  principal  objection  to  the 
philosophy  of  the  latter  would  have  been  that  it 
assumed  an  unscientific  difference  of  kind  between 
the  gorilla  and  its  human  descendant.  So  he  may, 


ANATOLE   FRANCE  141 

in  a  sense,  be  considered  as  the  precursor  of  the 
modern  retrograde  tclairt.  There  is,  at  least,  little 
doubt  that  were  he  among  us  to-day,  the  party 
represented  by  that  superior  person  would  on  the 
whole  have  his  approval.  I  do  not,  of  course, 
mean  that  all  its  contemporary  manifestations,  par- 
ticularly in  France,  would  have  his  support. 
Rather  his  sense  of  irony,  not  to  mention  his 
Christian  charity,  would  detach  him  from  not  a 
few  of  its  methods.  But,  on  the  whole,  the  atti- 
tude would  have  his  approval. 

M.  Bergeret  in  the  Histoire  Contemporaine  is 
the  other  most  important  incarnation  of  M.  France's 
thought.  Here  we  have  another  type  of  sceptic. 
The  Abb£  Coignard  had  not  much  faith  in  men, 
but  he  had  plenty  of  faith  in  God :  and  his  ideal 
beliefs,  far  from  dimming  his  vision  of  actuality, 
served,  on  the  contrary,  to  make  it  keener.  He 
whose  trust  was  in  the  Eternal  could  afford  to 
recognise  to  the  full  the  absurdity  of  passing 
events.  His  religious  faith  kept  his  heart  sound 
and  his  moral  nature  sweet  and  true  to  the  essential 
norms  of  human  instinct.  He  was  pure  in  heart 
because  he  saw  God.  M.  Bergeret  did  not  see 
God,  and  in  human  life  saw  little  else  than  a  wilful 
mass  of  indecent  absurdity.  And  in  consequence 
M.  Bergeret  was  unhappy.  He  did  not  merely 
suffer  from  passing  low  spirits.  He  was  per- 


142         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

manently,  radically,  essentially  unhappy.  Never- 
theless in  spite  of  his  unhappiness,  he  is,  in  a  sense, 
a  more  mature  expression  of  his  Creator's  philo- 
sophy than  the  Abbe"  Coignard. 

That  Anatole  France  is  an  individualist  of  the 
finest  water  is  sufficiently  evident  from  everything 
he  has  ever  said  or  written.  It  is  his  nature  to 
form  his  own  opinions  in  his  own  way  and  solely 
for  his  own  gratification.  The  vitality  of  his 
contribution  is  due  to  the  intensity  with  which  it 
expresses  now  this,  now  that  aspect  of  his  extra- 
ordinarily versatile  personality.  His  method  of 
criticism  displayed  more  clearly  in  the  four  volumes 
of  his  Vie  Littdraire  than  in  his  professedly 
imaginative  work,  is  a  significant  self-revelation. 
It  consists  in  a  certain  subtle  and  sympathetic 
penetration,  which  almost  reaches  the  point  of 
self- identification  with  his  subject.  It  is  in  this 
way  that  he  produces  his  illusion  of  objectivity. 
Thus,  whether  he  is  writing  of  Asiatic  religions, 
contemporary  literature,  science  or  philosophy,  his 
subject  seems  to  be  spontaneously  yielding  up  its 
inmost  secret  to  the  compelling  courtesy  of  his 
investigation  as  a  flower  yields  its  perfume  to  the 
caresses  of  the  sun.  For  he  treats  all  ideas  with 
the  uniform  and  exquisite  politeness  of  the  sceptic. 
Indeed  his  scepticism  is  an  important  part  of  his 
success  as  a  critic.  It  is  after  all  not  until  an  idea 


ANATOLE   FRANCE  143 

has  ceased  to  be  an  ideal  that  it  becomes  a  fruitful 
subject  for  criticism. 

Anatole  France  evidently  represents  a  more 
developed,  a  more  philosophical  scepticism  than 
any  other  writer  noticed  in  these  studies.  His 
position  is  roughly  that  our  only  knowledge  is 
science,  and  that  that  only  knowledge  besides 
bearing  solely  on  the  relations  of  things,  not  on 
their  nature,  and,  therefore,  in  no  way  dispelling 
our  essential  ignorance  of  them,  is  at  any  given 
point,  owing  to  the  progressive  method  by  which 
we  acquire  it,  more  wrong  than  right.  For  the 
science  of  to-day  so  transforms  that  of  yesterday 
as  to  make  it  false,  and  there  will  always  be 
to-morrow  to  be  counted  with.  Nevertheless  the 
method  of  science,  i.e.  the  application  of  the 
category  of  causation  to  the  connections  of  pheno- 
mena, while  telling  us  nothing  whatever  about 
their  intimate  nature  or  even  their  real  existence, 
which  it  assumes  and  leaves  for  ever  totally 
unexplained  and  unproved,  is,  subjectively  speaking, 
the  legitimate  development  of  the  instinct  of 
knowledge.  It  is  in  scientific  terms  the  'law'  of 
that  instinct,  which  merely  means  that  that  is  the 
way  in  which  that  instinct  behaves  when  it  reaches 
maturity.  Behind  this  fact  of  our  nature — for  it  is 
a  psychological  fact  that  so  and  not  otherwise  does 
our  mind  work — it  is  impossible  to  go.  It  is 


144         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

equally  impossible  to  discuss  its  validity  as  a 
philosophical  principle,  for,  in  order  to  do  so,  we 
have  to  assume  it :  it  is  therefore  but  waste  of 
breath  either  to  attribute  or  deny  to  it  metaphysical 
cogency.  This  fully  developed  scepticism  is  a 
very  different  matter  from  the  scepticism  of  the 
eighteenth  century.  That  movement  emancipated 
the  human  mind  from  theology ;  the  sceptic  of 
to-day  is  emancipated  from  the  superstition  of 
reason.  The  first  emancipation  leaves  the  mind 
anxious  and  ill  at  ease,  at  times  a  ready  prey,  on 
the  rebound,  for  some  new  fashion  of  credulity,  and 
if  the  intellectual  character  is  too  strongly  knit  to 
find  a  fancied  peace  in  such  a  solution,  suffering,  in 
proportion  to  the  emotional  depth  of  a  man's 
nature,  must  ensue.  Me*rim£e  is  a  case  in  point. 
But  when  error  is  torn  up  by  the  roots,  when  the 
mind  is  emancipated  from  the  illusion  of  reason  no 
less  than  from  that  of  theology,  man  begins  at  last 
to  live.  He  acquiesces  in  the  limitations  of  his 
cerebral  convolutions,  he  is  resigned  to  his  lot. 
Nay,  he  comes  to  love  it  with  all  its  defects,  with 
all  its  drawbacks.  '  Ma  petitesse  m'est  chere  ! ' 
cries  M.  France,  and  Nietzsche's  '  Amor  Fati '  is 
nothing  but  a  more  grandiloquent  phrase  for  the 
same  feeling.  Accepting  his  destiny  in  no  grudg- 
ing spirit,  doing,  that  is  cheerfully  and  with  full 
connaissance  de  cause  what  in  any  case  he  must  do, 


ANATOLE   FRANCE  145 

the  sceptic  turns  himself  to  the  loving  cultivation 
of  human  nature.  And  he  finds  his  sufficient 
reward.  For  now  a  miracle  happens.  The  sword 
of  his  intelligence,  which  snapped  like  a  silvered 
lathe  when  employed  on  immensities  and  incom- 
prehensibilities, becomes,  when  turned  to  its  true 
uses,  a  sure  and  tempered  weapon  in  his  hand. 
Art  and  science  and  the  cautious  betterment  of 
human  lot  within  the  limits  of  human  nature,  are 
the  appropriate  objects  on  which  his  '  Practical 
Reason '  exercises  itself. 

There  are  those  who  see  in  the  fact  that  M. 
France  has  devoted  himself  of  late  years  to  the 
furtherance  of  social  justice  a  backsliding  from  his 
intellectual  ideals.  The  criticism  is,  I  think,  a 
petty  one.  It  is  indeed  legitimate  to  question  the 
wisdom  of  his  methods.  We  may  reasonably 
doubt  that  the  socialistic  tendencies  which  he 
encourages  will,  if  triumphant,  produce  what  he 
hopes  for,  but  that  it  is  irrational  for  a  sceptic  to 
endeavour  to  make  himself  and  his  fellow-creatures 
more  comfortable  on  this  peculiar  planet  is  itself 
the  most  irrational  of  propositions.  A  great  living 
philosopher  tells  us,  that  even  if  we  are  all  going  to 
Hell  next  week  it  is  worth  while,  in  the  interval,  to 
read  Robert  Browning  in  preference  to  Robert 
Montgomery.  Equally,  whatever  be  the  ultimate 
destiny  of  humanity,  even  if  the  phrase  have,  in 

K 


146        SIX  MASTERS  IN  DISILLUSION 

strict  thought,  no  meaning,  it  is  important  that 
existing  humanity  should  be  as  happy  and  success- 
ful as  the  nature  of  things  permits. 

The  belief  in  the  universal  flux  of  things,  in  the 
absence  of  any  ascertainable  moral  or  intellectual 
order  in  the  world,  has  represented  the  conviction 
of  some  of  the  serenest  and  finest  of  human 
intelligences.  It  was  the  mental  attitude  of  an 
Epicurus,  a  Democritus,  a  Montaigne,  a  Gassendi. 
M.  France  has  put  it  before  us  once  more  with 
unrivalled  clearness  and  beauty  of  expression,  and 
with  a  modernity  of  touch  that  makes  it  move  in 
our  minds  as  an  actual  form  of  our  own  experience. 
The  sheet  lightning  of  his  quiet  irony  illuminates 
it;  and  the  glow  of  his  pity  suffuses  it  with  an 
irresistibly  attractive  humanity.  To  have  rendered 
thus  perfectly,  with  so  fine  and  conscientious  an 
art,  his  personal  vision  of  life,  gives  him  his 
supreme  claim  on  our  admiration,  on  our  intelligent 
sympathy.  The  commerce  of  wisdom,  we  are  told 
by  the  Preacher,  is  pleasant.  Those  who  doubt  it 
cannot  do  better  than  turn  to  the  works  of  Anatole 
France. 


EPILOGUE 

NOTES  ON  THE  PHILOSOPHY  OF 
DISILLUSION1 

THE  faith  in  reason  of  the  philosophers  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  however  noble  and  socially 
beneficial  an  attitude,  was  not,  and  could  not  be, 
the  permanent  resting-place  of  the  human  mind. 
Montesquieu,  Voltaire,  and  Diderot,  to  take  three 
different  types  of  eighteenth-century  thinkers,  were 
all  agreed,  in  spite  of  their  personal  differences,  on 
the  point  that  the  unfettered  use  of  reason  was  all 
that  was  needed  to  place  man  in  possession  of 
truth  and  happiness.  Their  position  involved  two 
important  a  priori  principles,  emphatically  articles 
of  faith,  not  of  reason ;  and  neither  more  nor  less 
articles  of  faith  than  the  fundamental  tenets  of  the 

1  It  need  hardly  be  said  that  these  '  Notes'  are  not  intended  as  a 
formal  exposition  of  the  Philosophy  of  Disillusion.  They  are  merely 
meant  to  suggest  and  illustrate  certain  positions  which  are  more 
widely  held  to-day  than  those  who  do  not  hold  them  may  think. 
Those  who  wish  to  study  the  subject  in  systematic  detail  cannot  do 
better  than  refer  to  the  works  of  M.  Jules  de  Gaultier  and  of 
M.  Remy  de  Gourmont,  published  by  the  Socie"te  du  Mercure  de 
France,  Paris. 

147 


148        SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

Church.  They  assumed,  prior  to  all  investigation, 
the  completely  rational  nature  of  reality,  and  the 
essential  goodness  of  all  men.  The  disillusion  of 
these  men  was  the  result  of  the  conquest  of  one 
faith  by  another.  That  is  to  say,  it  was  not, 
properly  speaking,  a  fundamental  disillusion. 
Faith  in  man  took  the  place  of  faith  in  God, 
Paradise  became  the  ultimate  state  of  society  to 
which  reason  was  tending,  Providence,  when 
science  came  to  eke  out  their  conceptions,  became 
evolution,  God  became  immanent  in  and  indis- 
tinguishable from  man ;  and,  in  the  case  of  the 
true  devotees  of  humanity,  the  religious  symphony 
was  merely  transferred  into  another  key. 

There  was  thus  a  symbolic  fitness  in  the  worship 
of  the  Goddess  of  Reason  on  the  dismantled  altar 
of  Notre  Dame.  The  Altar,  the  principle  of 
religion,  remained,  it  was  only  the  object  of  worship 
that  was  changed.  The  well-meaning  people  who 
organised  that  remarkable  function,  like  their 
earliest  predecessors  in  the  attempt  to  destroy 
Christianity,  knew  not  what  they  did.  Had  they 
pushed  their  philosophical  analysis  so  far  as  to 
criticise  their  new  deity,  they  would  have  realised 
that  it  was  no  more  unreasonable  to  worship  the 
Sacred  Host  of  Christian  tradition,  than  an  un- 
usually stout  courtesan.  That  analysis  indeed,  had 
they  but  known  it,  was  already,  in  its  essentials, 


EPILOGUE  149 

complete.  The  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  had 
appeared  twelve  years  before  the  apotheosis  of 
Mile.  Candeille. 

The  work  of  Kant  was  of  the  most  revolutionary 
description.  In  the  course  of  his  Transcendental 
Dialectic,  he  refutes  the  ontological  proof  of  the 
existence  of  God,  the  argument  of  St.  Anselm, 
Descartes  and  Leibnitz.  He  equally  shows  the 
inanity  of  the  other  two  traditional  arguments,  the 
physico-theological  and  the  cosmological,  which  had 
been  the  mainstay  of  the  philosophy  of  the  Catholic 
Schools.  On  the  other  hand,  the  antitheses  in  the 
second  and  third  Antinomies  show  the  impossibility 
of  the  existence  of  a  simple  substance,  and  conse- 
quently of  the  soul,  in  the  theological  sense  of  the 
term,  and  destroy  the  possibility  of  human  liberty 
in  an  ordered  universe.  The  main  theses  of  the 
philosophers  of  the  French  enlightenment  were 
thus  pricked.  Most  of  them,  indeed,  were  Deists, 
and  even  the  Atheists  required  a  moral  Absolute. 
Kant's  intellect,  however,  was  one  thing,  and  his 
temperament  another.  The  evangelical  Christian 
could  not  endure  the  conclusions  of  the  philosopher, 
and  the  Critique  of  Practical  Reason  laboured  to 
restore  the  spiritualist  positions  of  which  the  first 
Critique  had  made  short  work.  Resuming  the 
conclusions  of  the  first  Critique  in  the  proposi- 
tion that  God,  Freedom  and  Immortality  were 


150        SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

indemonstrable,  and  therefore  unknowable  to  Pure 
Reason,  Kant  here  insists  on  their  '  practical ' 
truth,  which,  when  analysed,  comes  to  mean  that 
it  is  wise  for  creatures  situated  as  we  are  to  believe 
them  to  be  true. 

At  the  side  of  the  great  metaphysical  poems 
of  Fichte,  Hegel,  Lotze  and  other  minor  post- 
Kantian  thinkers,  the  philosophy  of  disillusion  has 
pursued  its  course  through  the  nineteenth  century 
from  the  Critique  of  Pure  Reason  through 
Schopenhauer  to  Nietzsche.  It  has  consisted  in 
the  development  of  Kant's  idealism  into  a  purely 
subjective  phenomenalism.  To  put  its  main  con- 
clusion less  technically,  it  has  shown,  not  from 
abstract  considerations  but  by  means  of  an  analysis 
of  the  act  of  knowledge  as  it  occurs  in  our  experi- 
ence, that  thought  cannot  transcend  the  strictly 
relative  co-ordination  of  experience.  The  Absolute 
Realities,  which  form  the  theme  of  the  various 
dogmatic  systems  which  derive  directly  or  indirectly 
from  Platonism,  it  has  shown  (incompletely  in  the 
Critique  of  Pure  Reason ;  with  completeness  in 
Schopenhauer's  Fourfold  Root  of  the  Principle  of 
Sufficient  Reason)  to  be  nothing  but  the  lenses 
through  which  the  faculty  of  knowledge  represents 
to  itself  the  notion  of  external  existence.  The 
important  discovery  of  Schopenhauer  was  not  the 
oriental  myth  of  the  self-realising  and  the  self- 


EPILOGUE  151 

annihilating  Will  of  the  World,  but  his  simple  and 
irrefutable  statement  that  the  act  of  knowledge 
betrayed  on  analysis  its  own  relativity,  consisting, 
as  it  necessarily  did,  of  the  representation  of  an 
object  for  a  subject,  thus  implying  an  essential 
dualism.  From  this  impregnable  position  it  was 
easy  to  show  that  the  doctrine  of  an  absolute 
knowledge  identified  in  its  inmost  nature  with 
absolute  being  involved  a  meaningless  proposition. 
The  roots  of  Theism,  as  a  philosophical  explana- 
tion of  the  world,  were  cut  away.  M.  Jules  de 
Gaultier,  who  represents  better  than  any  contem- 
porary the  Philosophy  of  Disillusion  to-day,  has 
pointed  out  in  his  excellent  book,  De  Kant  a 
Nietzsche,  that  Kant,  while  preparing  the  way  for 
Schopenhauer's  theological  Nihilism,  had,  even  in 
the  first  Critique,  endeavoured  to  cover  his  own 
traces.  '  What  Kant  is  careful  not  to  say,'  observes 
M.  de  Gaultier,  '  no  matter  how  strong  the  evidence 
which  constrains  him  to  say  it,  is  that  the  idea  of  a 
First  Cause,  taken  as  a  transcendental  concept,  is, 
in  the  highest  degree,  one  of  those  concepts  which 
are  formed  in  contradiction  to  the  laws  of  reason, 
and  which  have  only  to  be  formulated  to  be  dis- 
avowed. Reason  furnishes  us  with  the  principle  of 
causality,  with  which  to  arrange  the  phenomenal 
world :  everything  which  exists,  exists  in  virtue  of 
a  cause.  A  cause  then  being  a  thing  which  exists, 


152         SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

the  right  deduction,  in  order  to  manifest  the  prin- 
ciple in  its  blinding  light,  is  that  every  cause  has  a 
cause.     That  is  the  principle  of  reason  which  must 
not  be  transgressed,  and  which  the  idea  of  a  First 
Cause,  a  cause  without  a  cause,  directly  violates.' 
And  M.  de  Gaultier  goes  on  to  observe,  with  a 
lucidity   which   many    philosophers    might    envy : 
'  When   the  reason  seeks   an   explanation  of  the 
universe,  it  goes  without  saying  that  that  explana- 
tion   must    be   intelligible   to  the   reason.       The 
intelligence  is  in  a  state  of  ignorance   before  the 
mystery,   the  question  of  the  reason   demands   a 
reply  which  shall  dissipate  that  ignorance.     Now 
to    attempt    to    dissipate   that   ignorance   by   the 
application   of    the    principle   of    causality    in    its 
legitimate  form  to  the  Whole  of  phenomena,  con- 
sidered as  the  effect  of  a  cause  situated  outside 
that    Whole,    is,    on    the    one    hand,    a    kind    of 
anthropomorphism,  but,  above  all,  it  explains  no- 
thing, because  the  form  of  the  principle  of  causality 
will  forthwith  oblige  the  mind  to  seek  for  the  cause 
of  that  cause  outside  the   world,   remounting   in- 
definitely in  the  void  from  cause  to  cause.     If,  in 
order  to  obviate  this  inconvenience,  theology  forms 
the  concept  of  a  First  Cause,  no  more  real  explana- 
tion is  given,   for  the  addition  of  a  word  cannot 
change  the  nature  of  reason,  and  make  intelligible 
what   was   unintelligible   before :    mystery   is    not 


EPILOGUE  153 

explained  by  the  incomprehensible.  .  .  .  To  explain 
the  existence  of  the  universe  by  means  of  this 
concept  is  to  propose  to  the  reason  to  admit  that 
two  plus  two  equals  five,  and  to  insinuate  that  at 
the  price  of  that  concession  hitherto  insoluble 
problems  can  be  solved.'  M.  de  Gaultier  relates 
this  divergent  branching  of  Kant's  intellect  and 
temperament  to  what  he  considers  to  be  the  general 
law  of  philosophical  development,  and  which  is,  at 
least,  a  more  than  ingenious  hypothesis.  It  is  this. 
The  Vital  Instinct  and  the  Instinct  of  Knowledge, 
far  from  being  the  allies  that  popular  educational- 
ists proclaim  them  to  be,  are  at  secret  war  with 
each  other.  The  Vital  Instinct  expresses  itself  at 
the  origin  of  one  of  those  groups  of  human  beings 
that  we  call  a  race,  in  a  collection  of  moral, 
physical  and  mental  attitudes,  that  have  nothing  to 
do  with  the  question  of  truth,  but  that  represent 
more  or  less  successfully  the  conditions  of  its 
durability  and  power  to  the  extent  to  which  the 
race  is  conscious  of  them  at  that  moment.  These 
prescriptions  are  the  work  of  a  law-giving  priest- 
hood, and  are  codified  in  religious  forms,  that  is, 
in  taboos.  It  seems  an  acquired  fact  that  they  are 
always  represented  as  the  teaching  of  revelation, 
never  as  the  result  of  observation  or  knowledge. 
In  process  of  time,  the  Instinct  of  Knowledge 
awakes  in  some  sceptic,  whose  vitality  is  declining, 


154        SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

and  if  he  cannot  be  suppressed,  he  has  to  be 
answered.  And  now  occurs  a  curious  inversion  of 
roles.  The  Vital  Instinct  disguises  itself  as  the 
Instinct  of  Knowledge,  and  if  unable  to  save  the 
old  myth,  promptly  invents  a  new  one  to  take  its 
place.  In  an  advanced  community,  where  an 
appeal  to  reason  is  implied  in  all  propositions,  the 
myth  is  philosophical  rather  than  crudely  natural- 
istic in  construction.  But  it  is  no  less  a  myth,  that 
is,  a  transposition  into,such  terms  of  reality,  as  the 
community  is  prepared  imaginatively  to  accept,  of 
the  vital  needs  of  the  moment.  M.  de  Gaultier 
illustrates  this  thesis  by  an  analysis  of  the  dogma 
of  Monotheism.  The  dogma  consists  of  belief  in 
a  God,  external  to  the  world,  who  is  its  creator, 
revealing,  either  miraculously,  by  infringing  the 
determinism  elsewhere  observable,  or  naturally,  by 
inspiration  in  human  consciousness,  a  moral  law, 
i.e.  a  good  to  practise  and  an  evil  to  avoid.  It 
involves  also  the  belief  in  man's  free  will,  by  means 
of  which  he  is  capable  of  observing  or  disobeying 
the  law,  thus  incurring  merit  or  demerit,  and 
deserving  punishment  or  reward.  Monotheism 
springs,  historically  speaking,  from  two  distinct 
roots,  Judaism  and  the  philosophy  of  Plato.  In 
its  purely  religious  form,  that  of  direct  revelation, 
it  represents  the  categorical  imperative  of  the  Vital 
Instinct,  asserting  itself  in  a  manner  beyond  any 


EPILOGUE  155 

question  of  rational  proof.  It  is  so  because  life  is 
so,  not  because  we  think  it  to  be  so.  It  is  otherwise 
with  Monotheism  considered  as  a  philosophical 
explanation  of  the  world.  In  this  case  proof  is 
required,  and  it  is  here  that  M.  de  Gaultier  detects 
the  deforming  effect  of  the  Vital  Instinct  on  the 
mechanism  of  the  intellect. 

The  enigma  of  knowledge  presents  itself  under 
a  triple  aspect  to  Plato.  There  is  first  the  scientific 
question,  how  do  we  know  external  objects  ?  Then 
there  are  the  two  other  categories  of  objects,  those 
of  the  moral  and  those  of  the  metaphysical  world, 
already  created  in  a  rudimentary  fashion  by  the 
Vital  Instinct,  which  demands  that  the  philosopher 
should  complete  the  work  begun.  These  objects, 
being  the  creation  of  the  mind,  are,  of  course,  very 
easy  to  handle.  They  are  not  under  the  control 
of  space  or  time ;  never  appearing  in  the 
phenomenal  world,  which  cannot  exist  except  in 
space  and  time,  they  can  easily  brave  any  possible 
refutation  from  experience.  It  is  easy  to  believe 
them  to  be  of  the  same  nature  as  the  intelligence 
which  conceives  them ;  then,  all  that  is  necessary 
is  once  for  all  to  declare  them  endowed  with  exist- 
ence, outside  as  well  as  within  the  mind.  The  ruse 
here,  consists  in  the  fact  that  the  mind  being  un- 
able to  explain  the  fact  of  knowledge  by  the  fact 
of  existence,  quietly  reverses  the  terms  of  the 


156        SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

problem,  and  attributes  to  knowledge  the  power  to 
create  being.  It  is  exactly  the  same  process,  in 
the  intellectual  sphere,  as  that  of  primitive  man 
constructing  his  idols,  and  then  persuading  himself 
that  he  owes  to  them  his  own  existence. 

The  whole  of  this  process,  when  it  is  dealing 
with  the  objects  of  the  moral  or  metaphysical 
world,  is,  as  has  been  said,  beyond  the  possibility 
of  experimental  verification  or  refutation.  The 
vagueness  of  content  of  these  objects,  compared 
to  the  definiteness  of  the  objects  of  the  external 
world,  is  also  a  further  protection  to  the  vicious 
construction  of  the  process.  Let  us  observe  it  at 
work  on  the  fundamental  problem  of  knowledge ; 
how  do  we  know  of  the  existence  of  external 
objects  in  the  phenomenal  world  ? 

The  knowledge  of  an  object,  says  the  Platonic 
Socrates,  supposes  that  a  definition  can  be  given 
of  it,  and  to  define  is  to  classify  and  limit  under 
the  category  of  a  general  idea.  But  this  general 
idea,  which  confers  on  the  object  knowable  exist- 
ence, does  not  itself  belong  to  the  object.  Nor 
can  it  be  derived  from  the  senses  which  give  us, 
at  the  most,  very  incomplete  information  about 
objects.  Where  will  Plato  find  the  locus  of  these 
ideas,  the  necessary  intermediaries  of  our  know- 
ledge ?  Not  in  human  reason,  for  they  are,  he  says, 
its  objects,  being  independent  of  human  reason,  in 


EPILOGUE  157 

the  same  way  as  external  objects  are  independent 
of  the  senses.  It  is  in  the  Divine  Reason,  of  which 
they  are  the  attributes,  that  these  ideas,  the  eternal 
types  of  the  particular  objects,  perceived  by  the 
senses,  have  their  real  and  substantial  existence. 
This  is  the  doctrine  of  the  Platonic  Ideas,  and  if  the 
greatness  of  philosophic  doctrines  is  to  be  measured 
by  their  influence  and  duration,  it  is  undoubtedly 
one  of  the  greatest.  It  is  still,  after  twenty-four 
centuries,  the  ill-disguised  backbone  of  all  absolute 
metaphysic,  and  the  substance  of  all  theology, 
which  claims,  in  any  sense,  to  incorporate  reason. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  logic,  it  is,  however, 
singularly  vulnerable.  I  know  the  dog  of  Alci- 
biades  by  means  of  the  idea  of  dog,  I  proceed 
in  abstraction  to  the  idea  of  a  mammal,  from  that 
to  the  idea  of  an  animal  in  general,  from  that  to  the 
idea  of  existence  in  general.  But  does  on  that 
account  existence  in  general  exist  ?  Is  there  out- 
side my  mind  an  object  which  can  be  called 
existence  in  general  ?  Evidently  not.  Existence 
abstracted  from  any  particular  existence,  is  nothing 
but  a  category  of  the  mind  indispensable  to  the 
representation  of  external  objects,  all  of  which  are 
said  to  exist,  because  the  act  of  knowledge 
necessarily  groups  them  under  that  category  in 
itself  nothing  but  a  pure  mental  form. 

This  quiproquo,  by  means  of  which  thought  adds 


158        SIX   MASTERS   IN   DISILLUSION 

to  Us  legitimate  function  of  regulating  reality  the 
pretension  to  create  it,  is,  as  has  been  said,  the 
source  of  all  religious  philosophy,  it  is  also  at  the 
bottom  of  all  philosophy  that  implies  the  recogni- 
tion of  any  other  than  a  purely  phenomenal  value 
in  phenomena.  All  schemes  of  '  progress '  that 
represent  experience  as  moving  by  its  own  nature 
towards  the  realisation  of  an  intellectual  or  a  moral 
absolute,  depend  upon  it.  Even  Pragmatism,  the 
fashion  of  the  moment,  in  spite  of  its  jaunty  dis- 
claimer of  metaphysic,  is,  at  least,  its  illegitimate 
descendant. 

Philosophy,  like  the  kingdom  of  Heaven,  has 
rarely  been  sought  for  its  own  sake  alone,  and  the 
consequences  of  philosophical  disillusion  extend 
further  than  the  purely  intellectual  domain.  I 
have  said  that  to  refuse  to  admit  the  creation  of 
reality  by  thought  excludes  the  belief  in  the  exist- 
ence of  absolute  values  in  experience.  Morality, 
in  the  sense  that  it  has  commonly  been  understood 
during  the  reign  of  the  Platonic  Ideas,  must  go. 
Kant's  miraculous  Categorical  Imperative  is  an 
empty  phrase,  bombinans  in  vacuo,  not  so  much 
false  as  entirely  meaningless.  Conduct  appeals 
primarily  to  utility,  secondarily  to  taste,  virtue 
recovers  its  etymological  meaning  and  becomes 
again  the  virtus  of  the  Romans.  We  appreciate 
human  beings,  like  wines,  by  their  qualities.  If 


EPILOGUE  159 

their    behaviour    is    hostile    to    a    few   obviously 
recognised   utilities   we   call   them   criminals,   and 
suppress  or  shut  them  up  if  we  can.     At  a  further 
stage  of  discrimination,  if  we  find  them  unattractive, 
we   avoid   them — if  we   are   wise.     There    is   no 
mystery  about  this.     Here,   if  anywhere,  we   are 
chez  nous.      It  is  simply  a  question  of  affinities  and 
reactions ;  as  it  were,   a  chemical  problem.      At 
identical  stages  of  culture,  ethical  prepossession, 
i.e.  taste  in  conduct,  tends  appreciably  to  repeat 
itself  unchanged   in    different    individuals,    which 
agreement  constitutes  a  social  sanction  to  the  taste 
of  the   group.       But   that    agreement  guarantees 
merely   a   social    sanction.      The   fact   that    most 
people  like  dry  champagne  does  not  constitute  that 
taste  an  absolute  value.     There  is  no  difference 
of  kind  between  moral  qualities  and  good  manners. 
There  is  no  doubt  that  such  conclusions  as  these 
are  wellnigh  intolerable  to  many  people.     In  fact, 
roughly  speaking,   it   is   only  those  in  whom  the 
instinct  of  knowledge  has  corroded  their  vitality 
who  can  endure  them  complacently.     Such  as  they 
find  their  greatest  joy  in  the  gratification  of  their 
intellect,  and  the  justification  of  the  world  to  them 
consists  solely  in,  its  spectacular  value.     The  Vital 
Instinct  may  be  trusted  to   keep  them  in  a  per- 
manent   minority,    for  too   many  of   them   would 
bring  humanity  to  an  end.    They  will  not,  however, 


160        SIX   MASTERS   IN  DISILLUSION 

disappear — except,  indeed,  possibly  by  violence ! 
For  the  work  of  the  analysis  of  the  faculty  of 
knowledge  has  been  done,  and  those,  whose  minds 
are  so  constructed  as  to  be  able  to  appreciate 
the  process  will  not  be  able  to  escape  its  con- 
clusions. Nor  are  they  really  so  dangerous  to 
the  interests  of  the  Vital  Instinct  as  some  of  its 
champions  may  think.  '  On  peut  diner  sans  p&:he 
chez  les  athees,  ils  se  damnent  tout  seuls,'  said 
the  Abbe  JeYome  Coignard.  The  Philosophy  of 
Disillusion  has  nothing  to  offer  save  an  entirely 
disinterested  intellectual  gratification.  There  are 
those  to  whom  such  a  gratification  is  the  most 
precious  part  of  their  experience,  but  they  are 
very  few,  and  such  disinterested  spectators  of  life 
cannot  be  either  proselytisers  or  fanatics.  They 
have  no  quarrel  with  life,  they  are  far  from  the 
intellectual  arrogance  of  pessimism ;  on  the  con- 
trary, echoing  Renan's  '  Faisons  le  spectacle  aussi 
varie  que  possible,'  they  wish,  and,  au  besoin, 
encourage  the  Vital  Instinct  to  work  as  energetically 
as  is  compatible  with  their  own  safety.  But  what 
of  the  other  camp  ?  Is  it  permissible,  to  put  the 
question  in  the  terms  of  M.  de  Gaultier's  hypothesis, 
to  attempt  to  anticipate  the  secret  of  Life,  to  pro- 
phesy the  next  mask  which  the  Vital  Instinct  will 
assume?  The  masks  of  philosophical  religion, 
(Protestantism  filtering  into  Deism,)  and  humani- 


EPILOGUE  161 

tarian  rationalism,  seem  torn  past  mending.  It  is 
difficult  to  imagine  a  new  one.  There  is,  of  course, 
science,  but,  apart  from  experimentalists,  it  does 
not  seem  capable  of  creating  any  great  enthusiasm. 
Its  intellectual  prestige,  and  its  value  for  industrial- 
ism, for  the  improvement  of  the  material  conditions 
of  life,  leave  untouched  the  emotional  part  of  man's 
imagination.  Under  these  circumstances  it  seems 
not  impossible  that  the  Vital  Instinct  may  return  to 
its  earliest,  most  impenetrable  mask,  that  of  direct 
revelation.  The  means  is  at  hand.  In  spite  of 
philosophers,  the  Church  is  still  in  the  world,  and 
the  principle  of  the  Church  is  as  irrefutable  as  it 
is  indemonstrable.  Its  methods  of  representation 
will,  no  doubt,  have  to  be  modified,  theology  has 
been  refuted  as  fact,  and  the  shreds  of  philosophy 
with  which  its  apologists  have  attempted  to  drape 
it  have  been  ruthlessly  torn  from  it.  But  surely 
neither  the  vital  instinct  nor  the  Church  will  be 
embarrassed  by  such  trifles.  It  may  be  doubted 
whether  any  single  human  being  has  ever  believed 
in  a  religious  dogma  as  the  conclusion  of  a  syllogism. 
Abyssus  abyssum  invocat.  The  man  in  whom  the 
vital  instinct  clamours  for  the  satisfaction  of  religion 
has  already  a  subconscious  faith  in  religion.  And 
the  impossibility  of  establishing  such  faith  either 
on  external  facts  or  on  philosophy,  when  thoroughly 
brought  home  to  him,  leaves  him  with  the  alter- 


162        SIX   MASTERS   IN  DISILLUSION 

native  of  acceptance  of  authority  or  despair. 
Between  the  two  the  Vital  Instinct  cannot  hesitate. 
A  certain  kind  of  temperament  is  as  much  deter- 
mined to  believe  in  religion  as  a  certain  kind  of 
intellect  is  determined  to  do  without  that  belief. 
Or  rather,  to  be  exact,  the  difference  is  not  between 
a  temperament  and  an  intellect,  if,  for  the  sake  of 
argument,  these  convenient  distinctions  may  be 
drawn,  but  between  two  kinds  of  temperament. 
Pascal  had  certainly  as  much  intellect  as  ever  fell 
to  the  lot  of  the  most  disabused  philosopher.  He 
himself  indeed  was  one  of  the  greatest  of  philosophic 
Nihilists,1  but  his  intellect  did  not  prevent  him 
believing  in  the  God  of  Jansenism.  And  this 
suggests  another  reflection.  The  psychological 
unity  of  the  individual,  except  in  a  purely 
practical  and  relative  sense,  is  a  deduction  from 
spiritualist  philosophy.  There  is  no  scientific 
reason  for  thinking  that  a  man's  intellect  and 
temperament  must  be  unified.  Experience  also 
shows  us  that  such  unification  is  by  no  means 
necessary.  Pascal  is  a  case  in  point,  and  Gassendi 
was  an  excellent  priest  and  an  atheist  in  philosophy. 
Similarly,  there  seems  no  reason  why  a  man  should 
not  accept  the  Philosophy  of  Disillusion  with  his 
intellect  and  the  Church  with  his  Vital  Instinct. 
Such  an  attitude,  to  whatever  other  criticisms  it 

1  I  hope  to  discuss  this  elsewhere  in  detail. 


EPILOGUE  163 

may  be  open,  at  least,  in  no  way  offends  the  laws 
of  the  intelligence.  It  is  an  acute  remark  of 
M.  de  Gaultier's  that  if  Kant  had  been  a  Catholic 
he  would  not  have  written  the  Critique  of  Practical 
Reason.  Whether  such  an  attitude  is  likely  to  be 
widespread  is  another  matter.  A  man  will  hardly 
reach  the  conclusions  of  philosophic  disillusion 
unless  he  is  the  fortunate  or  unfortunate  possessor 
of  an  unusually  developed  instinct  of  knowledge. 
The  use  of  his  mind  must  have  been  a  dominant 
and  disinterested  passion  to  him,  bringing  him  its 
own  joy,  simply  by  its  exercise  and  quite  indepen- 
dently of  its  conclusions.  An  individual's  energy 
being  necessarily  limited,  it  seems  unlikely  that  the 
Vital  Instinct  will  be  strong  enough  to  create  the 
religious  need  in  such  a  man.  But  the  possibility 
of  such  a  case  cannot  be  denied  either  by  science  or 
by  the  Philosophy  of  Disillusion. 


S.    DOMENICO   DI    FlESOLE, 
October  1908. 


Printed  by  T.  and  A.  CONSTABLE,  Printers  to  His  Majesty 
at  the  Edinburgh  University  Press 


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